Writer Chris Lehmann, writing in In These Times
From a short essay, “A Hipstamatic Moment,” dealing with Kodak’s bankruptcy and how “we still crave the instant nostalgia that was once the company’s hallmark.”
“Strangely enough, in the great digital-imaging frontier that has passed Kodak by, consumers are increasingly prey to crippling nostalgias of their own. The hip adopters of digital photography have gone retro. One of the biggest photo apps on the iPhone is Hipstamatic – a program that uses filters and faux-aging features such as film scratches and waterspots to simulate the look of the Kodak-era snapshot: something imperfect, unrepeatable and historically contingent. Such imperfections should be central to photography, which is, after all, devoted to capturing the fleeting character of human perception in a single, irreducible instant.”
