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| Art or crap? Surprise, it's neither! |
So, as I mentioned last week, I got an iPhone. I haven't gone too crazy with buying apps--for instance, I really don't need an app that simulates a light saber noise every time the phone is moved around, as awesome as that would be. My favorite by far is the ubiquitous Hipstamatic, which gives a retro analog look to photographs, thanks to a variety of simulated films, lenses, and flashes. Though you can manually change the settings, the fun of Hipstamatic is the randomness of it--by literally shaking the phone/camera you can get hundreds of different combinations and results with every picture. I've already purchased the additional filter packs--yes, all of them, thankfully they're only 99 cents each. It tends to learn towards the side of twee (I'd be willing to bet that all the photos posted on Zooey Deschanel's website are taken using Hipstamatic), but overall it's really rather fun, and
the results can be very cool.
And yet, I'm only just starting to take pictures. I have a strange, misplaced sort of reluctance about it after reading a few articles on iPhone photography and using apps like Hipstamatic and the somewhat similar Instagram, then making the mistake of reading the comments, thinking there would be other useful tips to be found there. Oh, there were tips, don't get me wrong. But there was also a good share of acrimonious sniping about "fauxtographers" who have the audacity to try to pass off their pictures as legitimate art. Evidently a photograph is only worthwhile when it's been taken on a "real" camera, as opposed to a camera that's part of a phone, God fucking forbid, and properly altered by someone who's been schooled in Photoshop.
You know, I've been on the internet for sixteen years now, and yet I continue to be amazed at how people get their feathers ruffled over the most trivial, absurd things. You can't get people to give a flying fuck about the fact that Rick Santorum, whose grasp on American history is so tenuous he thinks that John F. Kennedy instigated the separation of church and state, is winning Republican state primaries left and right. But an 85 year-old woman writes a vaguely positive review of Olive Garden for a North Dakota newspaper, and everybody has something to say about it, much of it snarky and condescending. The internet, and more specifically social networking, has made shitting all over things other people find enjoyable a sport of kings, especially if it's done in a way that suggests your own tastes are superior and irrefutable.
I say this being quite aware that I've participated in that sport quite a bit, and now feel rather ashamed of it. I'm not sure if I'm fully reformed, but I've definitely had my moment of clarity, if you will. I'd like to spend the second half of my life looking less like a massive, judgmental tool, and part of that involves not acting grievously offended about the things other people enjoy. It's hard when I know there are people out there who own copies of Train's "Hey, Soul Sister," but someone else's...let's say questionable taste in music affects my life not a whit, so there's no point in raising my blood pressure over it. Now Hot Chelle Rae's "Tonight Tonight," that's something else, but I'm better off just pretending that song doesn't exist.
Such is the ire over cell phone photography and filter apps--how exactly is this hurting anyone? Some teenager posts a picture online he took of a barbed wire fence with a red filter and old timey border, and somehow this minimizes the timeless art of photography. You don't earn the right to call yourself a photographer unless you own several thousand dollars of equipment and have spent time in the trenches of paid photo shoots, recreating that hilarious shot of a best man pointing to his watch indicating to the groom that it's almost time for the wedding, or finding creative ways to frame a bare, bulging pregnant stomach.
Seriously, who gives a fuck? I used to feel that way about writing. As far as I was concerned, you weren't a real writer until you scored a contract with a leading publishing house, and I looked down on people who self-published vampire porn or faerie trilogies and shit like that. But you know what? Those people? They are real writers. They've certainly earned the official title more than I have at this point, and it's damn humbling, let me tell you. Self-publishing and e-publishing is the wave of the future, so while they may not be the next J.K. Rowling, or even the next Stephenie Meyer, they're at least ambitious and ahead of their time. Meanwhile, I'm still expecting J. Hollingsworth Moneybags, the president of Random House, to show up at my door with a million dollar contract and the keys to his vacation home in the Hamptons.
You know what's the difference between using Photoshop and using a filter on Hipstamatic? Time. What can take frustrating hours on Photoshop takes less than one minute on Hipstamatic. That's it. I'm pretty sure that if you were to set up a Pepsi Challenge between a picture taken on a professional level camera tweaked with Photoshop and one taken on an iPhone or Android with Hipstamatic, the average layperson wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Maybe that's the problem--since it's now possible for virtually anyone who has a working index finger to take a picture and almost instantaneously get the same results that normally would require a complicated setup and a great deal of altering after the fact, photography is now taken less seriously. You could conceivably create an entire portfolio in ten minutes, with a $2.99 app.
Let's face it, like writing, success as a photographer, beyond the standard wedding/baby/glamour shots field, relies almost as much on luck as talent. Some of the most unforgettable photographs of the modern era have been taken by people who happened to be in the right place at the right time. You think the guy that took the picture of the little Vietnamese girl running down the road spent an hour beforehand painstakingly arranging the lighting and aperture setting? No, he saw an opportunity for a gripping photo and he took it (and hopefully threw a bucket of water on that poor kid immediately afterward).
There's something kind of beautiful about the randomness of Hipstamatic. True, any idiot can shake an iPhone and push a button, but sometimes doing just that creates a breathtaking image. Like it or not, it's a real photograph, taken with a "real" camera, merely tweaked to make it look like a was taken with a different kind of camera. Wilco recently put out a limited edition of their latest album on cassette1, and the artwork was chosen from pictures taken using Hipstamatic. So clearly someone thinks it's art, and if it's good enough for Jeff Tweedy, then, goddammit, it's good enough for me. Let's find something else to drop our monocles over, shall we?
1. Kids, ask your parents.
NOTE: I took the picture featured here. I thought it looked kind of neat. This is not an invitation to tell me how it could have been done better.
