Why iPhone Photography is a Good Thing
Or, Instagram Does Not Herald the End of Civilization as We Know It
Apparently a photograph taken with an iPhone made it to the front page of the New York Times about six months ago, resulting in a great deal of hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth within the photographic community. Given the mainstream popularity of Instagram and its cousins, preachifying about the imminent demise of photography seems to be the cool thing to do these days. And to buoy the paranoia, consider the recent brouhaha around Flickr’s major revamp and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s proclamation that “there’s really no such thing as professional photographers anymore.”
Just so you get the whole story without having to follow that first link, I should note that the photograph in question was taken by a respected professional sports photographer. And he took some “real” pictures as well, with his “real” camera. But, between the photographer, the editor, and even Getty Images, apparently the iPhone captured the most appropriate picture this time around.
Anyway, whenever these teapot tempests arise in which people work themselves into a remarkably rich lather about this or that new thing killing everything good that came before, I find myself making essentially the same point every time: I’m pretty sure that more garbage increases the value of what quality work remains. But without being rude by insinuating that everything on Instagram is garbage—it’s definitely not—I argue that this mobile photography stuff is a Good Thing™ that connects people more with the process of photography than they have been at pretty much any time in history. Since not long after the beginning of the point and shoot camera over a hundred years ago, only hardcore hobbyists—what we might call prosumers today—developed their own film. In effect, the only difference between digital and film photography as practiced by the vast majority of people is the time between taking the picture and seeing the result. A film camera might as well be a digital camera that’s really slow at processing the image.
Back in the Good Old Days
In the very beginning the photographer had to control the picture from start to finish. As soon as we could have our film developed in a store, the vast majority of us have been taking nothing more than snapshots—functional images to document our lives for our own entertainment. This has continued through the digital era.
Back when film was our only option, if we wanted to take our photography “to the next level,” we might have developed the pictures ourselves. We would crop our images to fix the composition. We would dodge, burn, use this or that chemical, mess with variable contrast paper, and adjust exposure and development time to fine tune the look. We would cross-process our film or solarize our paper for “art effects.” We would even use leftover Soviet cameras and bad lenses on purpose. (Recall that Lomography was the original Instagram back in the late ‘90s and is still going strong. If you follow that link, you will be forgiven for thinking that you’ve found your way to some sort of Instagram aggregator.)
These are all ways of sculpting our images beyond just getting the capture. An Instakiddie of today might think of all these things in terms of filters. And they wouldn’t be that far from the truth.
Essentially, where I’m going with this is that, with Instagram, people are actually thinking about their pictures rather than just taking them. The average iPhone photographer is way more involved in the photographic process than the average snapshotter of the last hundred years. I know some people are upset about how easy Instagram makes it, but I see people actually doing darkroom work now that you don’t actually need a dark room in which to do it.
Enough with the Negative. How About the Positive!
Now, those last few paragraphs just address some of the main concerns of mobile photography’s detractors—that the thought and the human element and the challenge is leaving photography. But what about the positive argument, with mobile photography considered in its own right and not as an enemy or even alternative to “real” photography?
The point of every photograph is to do a job. In the context of this essay, that job is to please an audience. This can be by how well the photograph documents an event, by how pretty it looks, or even by how well it communicates an artist’s most abstract concepts. But clearly all these things are platform agnostic. All but the most rabid doctrinaires know that it doesn’t really matter whether you use a Nikon or a Canon. Why not take that a little further? There is only a loose correlation between a camera’s sensor size and its documentary ability, or a lens’s maximum aperture and it’s ability to produce pretty pictures, or even a software suite’s complexity and the quality of the conceptual art extracted from it.
So, as long as we keep it in mind that no (reasonable person) says that an iPhone 5s is objectively as good as a Nikon D610 in all respects, we can sit back and allow ourselves to enjoy all the beautiful imagery sitting in our pockets just waiting to lift our spirits.
