“Visitors take a picturesque ferry across the bay from the airport on the leeward side of the base to the main camp where the prison is held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Star security reporter Michelle Shephard snapped these iPhone Hipstamatic photos this weekend covering the Sept. 11 trials.”
Posts tagged photojournalism
Interview: Ben Lowy talks to the New York Times about iPhone photography
There’s a terrific interview at the New York Times Lens blog with Ben Lowy, who’s made a mark in photojournalism with his images from Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere (and for his defense of iPhone photography). As the article notes, “For the last four years, he has been ardently defending cellphone photography on Twitter, Facebook, his Tumblr and in real life. As he sees it, shooting with cellphones and Hipstamatic is no different than picking black-and-white film over color or deciding to shoot with a Holga camera instead of a large-format camera. The decisions are executed in the camera before the image is exported.”
In the interview, Lowy addresses some of the criticism of iPhone photography, especially in photojournalism: “I think there are a lot of purists out there. It’s just like, when people didn’t accept Eggleston’s color photography and said you can’t do art with color. They couldn’t move on and were unwilling to accept this as a new form of communication, of art. I think that’s the same thing with iPhone photography. The idea of using a tool that everyone and their brother and their mother has can make some people feel less exclusive. You know, art is only that rare stuff that certain people in certain circles can get and that rarity is what makes it art.”
Do Instagram photos “cheat the viewer”? I don’t think so
That’s the claim in a CNN article (“Why Instagram photos cheat the viewer”) by photojournalist Nick Stern.
“The app photographer hasn’t spent years learning his or her trade, imagining the scene, waiting for the light to fall just right, swapping lenses and switching angles,” he writes. “They haven’t spent hours in the dark room, leaning over trays of noxious chemicals until the early hours of the morning.”
I don’t see it that way. To me, apps are just another tool in the photographer’s arsenal, and many other photographers, professional photojournalists included, see it that way too. Just read what New York Times photographer Damon Winter had to say about his Hipstamatic images from the war in Afghanistan, “Through My Eye, Not Hipstamatic’s.”
But Stern seems to bristle just at the idea of photography apps. “Every time a news organization uses a Hipstamatic or Instagram-style picture in a news report, they are cheating us all,” he says. “It’s not the photographer who has communicated the emotion into the images. It’s not the pain, the suffering or the horror that is showing through. It’s the work of an app designer in Palo Alto who decided that a nice shallow focus and dark faded border would bring out the best in the image.” He later adds: “Hipstamatic, Instagram and other apps produce images that are equally unethical or perhaps even more so. The image never existed in any other place than the eye of the app developer.”
Sorry, but this is ridiculous. What about the effects produced by lenses, films, and other photographic tools? Those tools were not created by the photographer—they were created by the likes of Kodak and Fuji and Nikon—but they were used by the photographer, and they reflect the photographer’s vision. Certainly apps take this to another level, and news organizations shouldn’t pump of over-processed images and consider them photojournalism. But there’s little evidence that that’s happening. If anything, news organizations are being careful in using images from these apps. Where’s the evidence of journalistic standards eroding, rather than evolving?
That’s the gist of this article.
New York Times labels iPhone photo as “cellphone photo, altered by a popular app”
That seems like an odd thing to include in a caption.
I mean, the Times published Damon Winter’s Hipstamatic images of Afghanistan, and it did so on the front page, without any indication whatsoever (in the print edition, at least) that they were taken with an iPhone or Hipstamatic. So why is the Times labeling the photo of Central Mountain High school in this story (also on B13 in the print edition) as a “cellphone photo, altered by a popular app”?
The photo is by Will Yurman.
Photojournalist Benjamin Lowy, the Libyan revolution, and Hipstamatic
Photographer Benjamin Lowy has been shooting startling, visceral photos of the Libyan revolution, and he’s been doing it with his iPhone and Hipstamatic.
In an essay at Getty Images, he writes about the attraction of the iPhone for war reporting. “As photojournalists our responsibilities include not just communicating content, but also creating an aesthetic, a visual narrative that will capture our audience’s attention,” he writes. “Using my iPhone allowed me transmit images from the field updating my blog like many of the Libyan revolutionaries around me,” he writes. “Embracing this new paradigm of journalism - no middleman, no publisher - I posted images from Libya and gained over 500 followers in a week, regular curious people - Libyans, Americans, Europeans - who bypassed traditional traditional news sources.”
Lowy recently arrived back in Libya, and MSNBC posted some new images from his travels.
You can learn more about him at his website.
The New York Times Lens blog, always a great source of stories about photojournalism, puts the spotlight on Richard Koci Hernandez (koci on Instagram):
Mr. Hernandez, 41, is a multimedia journalist who has always taken “low-fi, alternative approaches” to photography. On the iPhone, the results are wondrous. His images are intimate, like digital daguerreotypes. But they also transcend their size and invite the viewer to get lost in their complexity.
Female soldiers in Afghanistan, via Basetrack and Hipstamatic
Here’s a fresh and interesting perspective on iPhone photography from Rita Leistner, a professional photographer who joined the Basetrack effort that’s documenting the war in Afghanistan.
She’d never used a phone for photography, and there were a few surprises.
The first thing I did, as with any piece of new equipment, was look for the instructions. But there weren’t any. We were using the Hipstamatic app, which simulates analogue photography.
As she notes later:
But the limits of the Hipstamatic iPhone app are also part of its appeal – the discipline of the single objective square frame, the absence of artificial lighting, being forced to slow down. And while some amateurs will benefit from the funky effects of the app, no device can direct the shot: establish composition, subject and background, the relationship with your subject, the semiotics of colour, access to a war zone…
Her photos are beautiful, raw, and visceral. There’s a slideshow, “Female Engagement Teams in Afghanistan.”
