Happy New Year to all fotoLibra friends, fans, followers and freaks!

2014 may not offer the sunniest outlook the world of photography has ever seen, but we’re still going, we’re still optimistic, we’re still hopeful and we’re still excited by the great photographs our contributors are offering for sale. We’ve just had over 600 photographs of Uzbekistan uploaded. That’s 600 more than we had before.

If there’s a shadow on the horizon, it’s our supportive media. Not content with driving image prices down to little more than zero — that’s why you don’t see your photographs in the national press — they have taken to publishing articles not just predicting the death of photography, but also the death of the camera itself.

Yet one prediction I read (unencumbered by any trace of fact, footnote or reference) estimated that one trillion photographs would be taken in 2014. Clearly it’s a dying business.

To pile insult on injury, one of the big Christmas films is ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’, a Ben Stiller vehicle based on the famous James Thurber short story. The original story is less than four pages long. While Walter Mitty is on a shopping trip with his wife he daydreams in turn of being a naval commander, a top surgeon, a crack shot, an ace bomber pilot … and we never learn what he actually is, apart from a hen-pecked husband.

But Ben Stiller, faced with spinning a little over three pages of text into 114 minutes of Hollywood magic, had to find him a job.

What job did he choose for the world’s most hopeless fantasist?

A fotoLibrarian, that’s what. How do you think we feel?

We feel very strongly that this is an unfair — oh, hang on … gotta go, there’s the Nobel Prize committee on the phone again.