There’s a lot of talk in photojournalism circles right now around the topic of Instagram & Hipstamatic images. They draw on nostalgia and emulate analog techniques such as cyanotypes, pinhole, Polaroid transfers and even aging. They satisfy two ends: they have an atmospheric quality generally amiss in digital and are distributed through mobile devices. These are tools that were conceived of for popular culture. Professional images generated from mobile devices began to appear in conflict photography stories first, where it was safer and more anonymous for journalists to shoot on the iPhone. The rest is history; this week both Time Magazine and National Geographic announced portals on their sites for Instagram images.
Ed himself uploaded an image into the NatGeo portal. He immediately received a slew of crude and thoughtless personal comments. The experience was psychologically unsettling and he took the image down. How do photojournalists uphold the integrity of their careers and participate in the dialog of mass culture?
First, there is the debate about craftsmanship. “With Instagram and Hipstamatic, it’s all a gimmick. It’s pure laziness.” Jean-Francois Leroy said in a recent British Journal of Photography interview. From there, the debate turns to what defines a professional versus an amateur. Is it safe to assume that a professional, one who charges money for their work, strives to create images that demonstrate a lasting quality and rise above popular culture? In fine art photography, this distinction seems to be much clearer whereby if you think the series would benefit from a dramatic use of focal planes, you drag out the 4X5 not the Hipstamatic. Finally – always — we arrive at the economic debate. If a professional journalist chooses to participate in the social media streams of popular imagery, can they expect to be compensated differently and are they generally degrading the line that divides citizen from professional journalism?
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4 Comments
I’m not a photojournalist. But I totally get the idea of even a shooting with a smartphone, if it’s what you need to do to get the shot. Sometimes waving a DSLR around just isn’t an option. Or whatever. I don’t really care about the medium or the mechanics if you’re getting the best and most appropriate shot you possibly can.
But what I don’t get is the need to do it via an app — like Instagram or Hipstamatic — that deliberately breaks what have been very common and very long-standing rules of image adjustments. Take the AP for example … “Changes in density, contrast, color and saturation levels that substantially alter the original scene are not acceptable.” Even NatGeo’s photography contest rules state not to use filters, calling them “too gimmicky.”
Obviously not everybody plays by the same rules … I guess I just question why the whole filter thing is necessary. Why Instahipstagrammatic and not just … a cameraphone?
I am a real estate and sports photographer. Instagram on my iPhone has allowed me to capture and share fleeting moments that would not be possible with an SLR.
Who takes a D700 and 24-70 lens on morning walks with the dog anyway?
As with anything else, there will be “Wow” images among all the noise of the overfiltered and otherwise overdone.
I’m all for it. Power to the people.
If you disagree with the trend, ignore it.
Rules were meant to be broken.
When I first saw the Hipstamatic images from Damon Winter’s award-winning Afghanistan photo essay for the New York Times, I was appalled. Not that they weren’t excellent images in and of themselves, but they came across as transparently editorial, as in the faux-editorial look of an advertising campaign.
Upon reflection (and after using the Instamatic app on my own personal Android cellphone) I realized that the manipulated images we produce are solidly in a journalistic tradition that goes back to at least the Civil War reporting of Ambrose Bierce, et al (see http://www.nytimes.com/1984/03/16/opinion/essay-patriotic-gore.html), but more familiar to us moderns is the writing of the man who invented “gonzo journalism,” Thomas S. Hunter.
Hunter threw out the hypocritical notion that a reporter can be “objective” by graphically describing his particular and personal post-modern reality, bats and all. We all understand that Hunter was reporting an hallucinogenic vision, but at the same time recognize that his hyperbole reached beyond the personal and described a facet of reality that we all viscerally know: the world is chaotic, facts and factoids bombard us from all sides; our perceptions are skewed by our personal culture biases; reality is plastic and the truth is hard to come by.
No doubt, he hinted that the world might be ultimately inexplicable, but at the same time it was his craftsmanship that allowed universals to emerge from his personal chaos. His humor and outrageousness explicated larger issues that we as “objective observers” all too often dodge with an artificial insistence that reality can only be definitively framed with an 8×10 standardized-frame status-quo Tri-X print; images, frankly, that may not actually explain anything.
Human beings have complicated emotions and our images should be emotional and complicated. If you want standardized, “objective” images, next time send out a drone camera-bot.
It seems to me to be pure snobbery to believe the only good images are produced by a DSLR. Perhaps using pricey and statusy equipment makes the proud professional feel superior to the rest of us, but beautiful images are captured on the iPhone every day and enjoyed globally!