Much has been said about the demise of photokina, announced last week with a statement that the world’s largest photography tradeshow is “suspended indefinitely,” 70 years after its first iteration. A sad end of an era.

I was not planning to write about this as well (yes, the camera market is structurally declining, yes, going back and forth between a bi-annual and annual event didn’t help), but I couldn’t help myself to also chime in and share some other perspectives as a relative newcomer to the conference, having attended three times in the last six years, i.e. when the show was already going through various stages of decline.

Often, your first impressions are the most insightful. Well, what struck me during my first visit to photokina back in 2014? Two things:

Coming from California, it made me wonder what century I was living in.

As it turned out, this was the last year photokina allowed these body-painted models at their show.

Image based on: Photo by Paula Guerreiro on Unsplash

I’ve since worked with the photokina management to include an educational program that featured well-known photographers showing their smartphone photography work and demonstrating their apps of choice, as well as app developers demoing their photo apps.

But, all in all, it was too little, too late. The photokina editions I’ve attended always felt a bit behind the times. When walking the floor you saw the usual vendors with their usual incrementally improved products. I rarely came away with a feeling of “wow, I guess this is the next big thing that will shake the imaging world.” 

Although I hate CES (but who goes there and doesn’t hate it?), I keep coming back every year and keep going home with a clear sense of what the next big things are going to be - whether these were pet tech products suddenly sprouting up, or IoT kitchen automation, or health & fitness tech solutions, or (now quite a while ago) high-end car tech that suddenly seemed to be everywhere. Sometimes they indeed ended up being the next big thing and you’d see them back big time the following year (for example, most recently CES feels like a car show in its own right). And sometimes they weren’t earthshattering after all, and the investors that had funded these companies’ expensive CES rollouts licked their wounds and moved on to whatever was next on their horizon.

I don’t think too many visitors have come back from photokina that way – at least not in recent years. Nor from PMA in its last 10 years of existence. Nor from Comdex (remember that show, which couldn’t really move on from being PC-centric and was left in the dust by CES?). 

Which all leads me to arguing against the dominant explanation of photokina’s demise, namely that it was caused by the decline of the traditional camera market – not unlike what people said about Comdex when the PC market was overtaken by where the action was: the internet followed by mobile phones.

But… photokina should have been like CES, not like Comdex. Photokina should have been the place where pro or hobbyist photographers would return from knowing that drone photography was the next big thing, or actioncams, or mixed photo/videography, or smartphone photography, or 360 photography, or gig photography, or cloud-based studio workflow automation, or social media photosharing, or crowdsourced stock photography, or influencer photo/videography, or AI image enhancements, or one-click app-based photo print product creation – or whatever could have been shown by an array of the absolute best-of-breed vendors in these then emerging areas as the next big thing before they started trending. 

In reality, if any vendors of any of these imaging innovation areas appeared at photokina, there were too few of them and they appeared too late. Photokina couldn’t escape from being the show where the traditional camera and photo print product vendors demoed their incrementally improved wares. 

Again, like Comdex and unlike the always "what's next"-focused CES.