If you have even a modicum of interest in photography it’s hard to ignore the rise of what has become known as “iPhoneography”. Even if you don’t have a specific interest in photography, but you have an iPhone, then it’s likely that you’re an unknowing proponent of it.

Put simply, iPhoneography is photography using the built-in camera on the iPhone and one, or more, of a plethora of camera and image editing apps available from the App Store.

Some of the more enthusiastic “iPhoneographers” might suggest, or even insist, that iPhoneography has to include editing the image on the iPhone, and others will go even further, insisting that to qualify an image has to be taken, edited, and published (usually to Flickr or to a Tumblr blog) using nothing but an iPhone.

At whichever level you want to take it to, something is very clear. There has never been anything like this in the history of photography.

Photography becomes ever more ubiquitous

From its invention in the middle of the 19th Century, through to the beginning of the digital age, photography was something ‘special’ to the majority of people. Even if they could afford the cost of equipment and processing, it was still a deliberate and considered action.

Families usually had one camera, and they took photos of special occasions and events. The number and type of pictures were limited by the time and cost of developing. I remember our family taking one camera and two rolls of film – 72 exposures in total – on a two week family holiday. On return we used to take the films to the lab, and pick them up in the following days. Sometimes the film would remain in the camera for months, always prompting the question of what was on it when we took it to be developed. It was fantastic to remember what we had done, and the pictures we had taken.

Instant cameras, (real ones), were developed, and became affordable. They were embraced for their immediateness, and their responsiveness. These qualities — the ability to instantly see and share a picture you have taken — led photography to becoming a distraction to the moment, rather than unobtrusively capturing it. This has been taken to new heights in the digital age.

The development of digital cameras took photography from the considered, to the ubiquitous. You could now take hundreds of images essentially for free. On holiday I might take 72 photos per day, and there is an argument that tourists only see their holidays through their viewfinder, and never stop to look.

The second big change in photography has been social media. It used to be that when friends returned from holiday, or an event, they would share their photos with you the next time you saw them, usually in the form of prints you passed around. Now you’re pointed towards a gallery on Facebook or Flickr, on which you can comment. With the advent of smartphones that Facebook gallery is likely to get started, and populated, in virtual real time.

Viewing photography as an event has been replaced with a post in the life stream of social media. A constant distraction to the moment. This is where photography has been heading since the invention of the instant camera, and it’s move to digital and online. From this perspective, the iPhone is the ultimate conceptual Polaroid. Maybe this goes some way to explaining the popularity of the “instant aesthetic” in iPhone photography apps.

As the quality of smartphone cameras approaches that of traditional point-and-shoot cameras, and when their processing power enables ever more powerful image editing software, a question is posed:

When does iPhoneography stop, and the output just become photography? And what are the implications for photography, and photojournalism, in this future?

A camera like no other

No other camera system has the creative range of the iPhone. It may only have a small sensor and a fixed lens at present, but no other system has tens of thousands of apps for image capture and processing, all of which are instantly available. No other camera has built-in 3G and Wi-Fi networking for instant upload and sharing. It presents an opportunity to capture and share a unique visual record of life like never before.

That is the point of of what has become iPhoneography. It’s not about the hardware, although that’s getting better in leaps and bounds with every generation, it’s about the software, and the flexibility that brings.

It’s possible to shoot, edit, write, tag and publish from your handset. Soon, there will be a generation of people who have grown up with no other experience. Who needs a (traditional) computer? Even the iPad looks rather clunky in comparison.

In this respect, traditional camera manufacturers are falling behind in a dramatic way. The best they can do is offer some picture presets and effects to their cameras. A few are gaining GPS, even fewer Wi-Fi. None of them have any sort development platform for third-party software. Panasonic have announced their own camera phone under their Lumix brand, but this looks to be more like a traditional dumbphone, with a point-and-shoot camera attached. It doesn’t have a development platform for third-party applications. If Panasonic were clever they would embrace Android. A true smartphone with a large camera sensor and a Leica designed lens on the back suddenly becomes a very interesting idea indeed.

This lack of understanding and development could have serious consequences for the camera industry. It is a huge oversight. Without their own platform, and with the sale and use of dedicated point-and-shoot cameras falling — just look at the Flickr stats — how long before Nikon and Canon launch their own official smartphone apps? If they’ve recognised the trends, they’re working on it already.

Don’t point, just shoot and share.

Mobile phone cameras break down the barriers of image taking, especially in photojournalism, reportage or voyeuristic street photography.

When most people see a camera pointed towards them, their self awareness increases. They are are more likely to freeze up, become stilted. With a mobile phone, there is still the benefit of the doubt it most cases. This is being challenged as all members of society become more technically literate but most of the time you’ll get away with it.

As such the camera phone gives us an opportunity to visually explore our environments from a perspective we don’t usually see. Seeing from a different, unusual, perspective, can drive photography forward. In a world drowning in images, it is seeing something from a different perspective — above, below, wide angle, in detail, spontaneous, without guard, unexpected — that gets our attention.

These traits are the social and creative force that drives what is known as iPhoneography, but to relegate the unlimited possibilities of mobile photography to cutsey retro-effect snaps is to do it a monumental disservice.

Social Journalism

Smartphones, today, are transforming photojournalism. When everyone has a high-quality, Internet connected, camera in their pocket at all times, visual reporting becomes instant, with previously unavailable human perspectives and driven through social media channels. One example is the first image of the Hudson river plane crash being shared through Twitter.

The key with photojournalism has always been to be there, and capture what happens. Unless they are incredibly lucky, photojournalists can only react to what has already happened.

This is becoming known as citizen journalism, but that can cover wide interpretations. A better name for this would be social journalism. Natural activity on social networks that has journalistic value. There are those who knock citizen / social journalism for various reasons, such as happenstance is not true journalism, although these complaints are usually related to self interest more than anything else.

The critics frequently point to inaccurate reporting from citizen / social journalists, and pass comment that the public are becoming immoral voyeurs, more concerned with getting an image than providing help. These are both valid points in their own way, but they are mirrored in professional journalism.

Live 24 hour news is a machine that needs to be fed. In any confusing, developing, situation mistakes are made, and they are broadcast or published. When discovered, mistakes are usually just not repeated, rather than being explicitly corrected.

The media being voyeurs to harrowing situations in which people are hurt, or dying, is nothing new. You only have to look at the work of Robert Capa, or more recently the Bang Bang Club in South Africa, to see that it is this voyeuristic view of the world that not only drives visual media, but is that which gains maximum attention.

For every Neda Agha-Soltan there is a Lindsaye Tshabalala. The harrowing images of Lindsaye being beaten and burned to death won Greg Marinovich the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1991. He made the conscious decision to photograph, rather than try to intervene. There are many other examples. It has been said that a photojournalist is someone who picks their camera up when others would put it down. That we see that behaviour in society is to be expected as the barriers to reporting, even in the social context, come falling down.

In 2011 Damon Winter won third place for feature picture story from Pictures of the Year International, a respected photojournalism contest, for a series of photographs taken with an iPhone 3GS and, somewhat ironically, the Hipstamatic app. For those who don’t know, Hipstamatic adds fake “vintage” film and lens effects to square-cropped photos taken with the iPhone’s camera.

Whilst Damon Winter’s defence for using this particular app, with the resultant applied aesthetic, rather than the standard built-in iPhone camera app, doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny, the fact remains the images themselves are valid photojournalism, whatever your opinion of the fake effects.

The technology blog Gizmodo surmised that whilst he may be the first photojournalist to win a prize using a photography app, he won’t be the last. They are correct.

Retro fantastic

Given that the possibilities for mobile photography, in terms of impact, are so huge, why, then, is Hipstamatic so popular?

On the iPhone 4 the camera and the default app produce perfectly good photos. Perfectly good for a ‘proper’ camera, that is. For a mobile phone, it’s simply fantastic. But that wasn’t always the case.

With the original iPhone and it’s immediate successor, the iPhone 3G, the camera hardware was, well, crude. A fixed focus 2MP camera, with a relatively cheap sensor. With the camera app you could turn it on and take a photo, and that was about it. The images it produced were typical of mobile phones at the time.

There are now thousands of camera apps available. Every possible usage scenario is covered, from general photography to specialist uses and image manipulation, such as stop motion animation, burst shooting, long exposures and, most often, retro and film effects.

In order to hide the poor technical quality of the iPhone camera, the apps added fake effects to mimic the real life consequences of the cheap plastic cameras: film grain, cross-processed colour, lens distortion, light leak, etc. What had previously been a (usually) undesirable consequence of using a cheap plastic camera had become a desirable aesthetic effect. It was embraced by hipsters and geeks who, for some unknown reason, wanted to make every photo they took look exactly the same.

A short analysis of everything that is wrong with Hipstamatic, and its ilk:

In the Hipstamatic you can choose a different film, lens and flash to use. You’re not, of course, doing any of this; the lens and LED flash are unchanged. What you’re actually doing is adding some templated effects to a picture. The app goes to great lengths to give these elements emotive sounding names, a throwback to hipsters of old. Someone even discovered an origin story, in the best comic book lore, of how two men in Wisconsin created a very limited run of plastic cameras. Intrigued fans scoured eBay to find one, before the whole wheeze was judged to be as fake the effects in the app.

Photography is ultimately about content, the context and the composition. Inside of that there is aesthetics: its graphical composition, is it portrait or landscape, the capture of life in colour, or reducing the image to the contrast and texture of black and white. There are many choices for a photographer to make, both at the point of capture, and in editing and post-production.

Hipstamatic produces a fixed square crop of every image. There are some images that work well as a square, but the majority don’t. It’s an unnatural format. It’s not how we, the viewer, see the world. It removes a key component of composition.

The application of standardised filters affecting colour, and adding ‘light leak’, processing errors and printing borders take away from the content of the image. They are a mask, applied on top. All images taken with the same filter end up with the same aesthetic. In a series they can look boring and dull. More than that, these effects are fake. They are trying to imitate a real life limitation, that existed purely as a consequence of cheap and affordable cameras. Whilst I subscribe to the idea of the imperfect lens (demonstrated by Pixar in Wall•E), the wholesale replication of undesirable effects to this extent is questionable.

Applying a fixed filter does not count as personal creativity. The creativity exists in the content, composition and timing of the image itself. A boring and pointless photo which has fake effects applied to it is still a boring and pointless photo, however you try to hide it. In the same way that the early iPhone camera apps used fake effects to hide the poor quality of the camera, the effects in these apps are now being used to hide the poor quality of the actual photograph itself.

There are photographs which are just about their aesthetic qualities, but those qualities should exist in the real world, which are then captured.

I hope this trend is a fad.

End of the short analysis of everything that is wrong with Hipstamatic, and its ilk.

Whilst compositionally it may be very different from using a ‘proper’ camera, iPhone photography should not be relegated. It is a proper camera, and can produce amazing pictures. The simpler the treatment of the photo, the more like the output of a regular camera, the more powerful it is.

What gives it that power is the unthreatening nature of the technology. The processed nature of the images can actually lessen this impact, distract, or even remove it.

iPhoneography is just photography, and the culmination of where it has been going since it was first invented. That said, we need to embrace the true capabilities of smart, connected, camera platforms, and the opportunities they bring. When we do this we will see the true power they hold.

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