Hipstamatic debate stoked by New York Times war photos
The Hipstamatic app—either you love it or you hate it.
That seems to be the attitude among a lot of iPhoneographers. OK, maybe I’m exaggerating, but more and more I read anti-Hipstamatic rants (or tweets, or comments). What’s at the heart of the negative attitude toward Hipstamatic? The complaints often fall along these lines: Hipstamatic is cool, sure, but maybe too cool for its own good. It’s being used, the anti-Hipstamatic crowd seems to say, to generate quick, interesting-looking shots, but the processing is too extreme, the effects are often random, and too many of the images look alike.
I’m a fan of Hipstamatic, though I’ve got to say, I know what the naysayers mean when they decry the proliferation of Hipstamatic images. I think they’re anti-Hip, in part, because Hipstamatic images are seemingly everywhere, especially at photoblogs.
And then, on November 22, The New York Times front page carried four Hipstamatic images from the war in Afghanistan, with more inside the paper and others available online. At the Times’s Lens blog, many people commenting noted the beauty of the images. Here’s a typical comment:
Beautifully done, evocative photographs. They really show the power of the medium. I particularly appreciate the composition of the photos, and I especially note the very effective use of vignetting, whether artistic from the photographer or artifactual from either the equipment or software.
But then others felt the Hipstamatic images were tantamount to altering photos with Photoshop and violating central tenets of photojournalism:
I don’t understand why this isn’t photo illustration rather than photojournalism. No unaltered version of the image is saved on the iPhone by the Hipstamatic app - of which I am a huge fan. But I wonder if it’s a distortion of what is actually there - an editorial distortion that needs to be acknowledged as such. To me, there’s a clear equivalent - it would be like recording sound from a city hall press conference on an iPhone only through the I Am T-Pain autotune app. Sounds cool. Not necessarily what happened. The alteration isn’t part of the story.
Well, I disagree with that, though I’ll say I’m sort of thrilled to see the debate happening and putting the spotlight on Hipstamatic, iPhone photography, and some of the issues raised by the processing available right on the camera.
Here’s the thing, with regard to Winter’s photos: Photography is not, and never has been, purely “objective” or “pure.” Consider the choices available to photographers throughout the 20th century, as photographic techniques and tools evolved: The camera was a choice, the lens was a choice, the film type was a choice. Those latter two, in particular, would often “skew” an image in ways far more extreme than Hipstamatic. A wide-angle lens or black-and-white film certainly stray from what is visible with the human eye—even further, I would contend, than Winter’s Hipstamatic images.
And what’s striking about the images, aside from the “look,” is the content of what he captures—and his images are astounding in the way they capture the day-to-day life of the soliders. As Winter notes:
Composing with the iPhone is more casual and less deliberate. And the soldiers often take photos of each other with their phones, so they were more comfortable than if I had my regular camera.
Check out this, too: The Hipstamatic debate: a guide to the controversy.
