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Life in the Shadows: Exploring the Raw Beauty of iPhone Photography
How shunning AI capabilities helps bring back the real world
I don’t like taking photos with my phone. That might sound pretty ironic, seeing that I’ve got over 86,000 photos on my Photos app — a frankly embarrassing amount that speaks volumes about my shutter addiction. But to my mind, the experience of taking photos with an iPhone pales in comparison to ‘the real thing’, by which I mean a standalone camera.
It’s not just the act of pressing a digital shutter icon on a screen that feels unnatural to me — the photos themselves leave something to be desired. If they seem eye-catching on a small screen, a quick glance on a laptop screen will reveal overblown images with colours, contrast and sharpening dialled to 11. The result is uncanny images that, for lack of a better word, just feel off.
I’m hardly alone in my assessment. Towards the end of last year, I read an article in The New Yorker that talked about this very phenomenon. In How I Fell Back in Love With iPhone Photography, Kyle Chayka describes how iPhone photos seem to favour clarity over realism:
They were sometimes unusually blurry or focussed in unintended spots; they were tinted by the chemical makeup of different types of color film. Apple’s camera, by…
