Interesting perspective on Instagram and film

[nightfly]

This brings together some of the things I've been thinking about regarding the popularity of Instagram and it's relationship to film photography (didn't write it but it crystallized some of my thinking):

http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/instagram-2012-4/

 

[Lord Nikon]

The filters (like those on Hipstamatic and other photo apps) also compensate for an amateur shutterbug’s spotty craftsmanship, shifting emphasis from the composition and content to the treatment

This is totally backwards.

Composition & content are more important in a photo with deliberate (or accidental) technical flaws.

The act of deliberately damaging the photo serves to remove importance from the technical merits of the photo (exposure, sharpness, white balance) leaving only composition and content.

 

[jsrockit]

I guess this is for those who think digital has no worth... or is somehow less important than film. I don't buy it. It's all just photography.

 

[nightfly]

I think it's actually much deeper than that. It's more about the loss of physically and the actual artifact of film and prints and how that effects our thinking and relationship to photography, memory and nostalgia (although perhaps this gives the original piece too much credit).

I don't think it is actually questioning the "worth" of digital or descending into the film vs digital debate, it's more about art in the age of digital reproduction to borrow Walter Benjamin's phrase.

Thought it was intriguing at least as I've been wondering myself why things like instagram and hipstamtic are compelling to people who never really had much experience with film to start with. It's almost as if it's nostalgia for a past that they never had.

 

[mep]

Yeah, I don't know. I've been using instagram sporadically since it started, and I think this article is about 18 months late. Over the last year or so there seems to be far more variation than this piece would suggest. While many might still be posting from their cell phones and using the in-built filters, I see an increasing number taking advantage of the improved quality of cameras in newer mobile devices and processing their images in Snapseed, Filterstorm, etc, to get results that are a bit beyond the nostalgic, retro thing (which Id say was the initial trend because it was the only way to get half presentable images from the then current in-built cameras).
Others upload film scans. Others pristine DSLR images.
Sometimes, I think it could be argued that for many, the whole instagram thing has little to do with photography at all.

 

[jsrockit]

Sometimes, I think it could be argued that for many, the whole instagram thing has little to do with photography at all.

Little to do with Photography, but it is still photography. I get your point though. Most who use that app don't care about the art or science of photography. In that way, the article is correct... it does mirror the way non-photographers utilized film.