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.”
Posts tagged kodak
“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.”
The Lytro, the iPhone, compact interchangeable lens cameras — yes, there’s a revolution in photography, with smartphones playing a big part in this: “Developments in smartphones and wireless networking have freed digital photos from the flash cards and hard drives. People now share their photos instantly from phones, gussying the photos up with software such as Instagram and using sites such as Facebook that capitalize on the fact that many photos are essentially a form of communication. In comparison, the relatively few cameras with networking abilities usually have only Wi-Fi that can’t compete with mobile phone network coverage.”
Is Kodak serious with this app?
Unfortunately, yes. The update screen touts the new features, and they’re, uh, so underwhelming it’s laughable. Rotating photos. Deleting images. Transferring images to your iPhone photo albums.
Here’s Kodak, the company that invented the culture around consumer photography, and this is what they’re doing for the iPhone and iPhoneography?
I’d say I don’t understand this, but it’s been pretty clear, for a while, that the real innovation in iPhone photography apps is happening with small (sometimes very small) players and startups, like Hipstamatic, Instagram, and many, many smaller app developers.
I don’t want to see Kodak, or any other big company, taking this over, but it would be fun to see what their engineers could do if they were really let loose to think through what they could offer the iPhone photography world.
