A few kibbles and bits about iPhoneography and some interests of mine. Much of this might sound academic. Don’t fret. My interests with photography are broad and increasingly mesh with my academic interests in new media and technology.
Why iPhoneography
Why not? It is fun, the camera is always with you, and it activates the photographic/technographic imagination.
Technographic Aesthetic
I’m relying here on Grant Kien’s term “technography” (see his book Global Technography, and this interview at The Imperfect Pen). New cultural interfaces like the iPhone do shape the way we look, record, imagine, and interpret the world. For some folks this might not register, but I believe the iPhone, and certainly its photography apps (although by no means reduced to just those) bring with it a new aesthetic. This aesthetic is not one so much related to the images we see (many folks tend to do quite similar stuff), but rather to how we start to look, imagine, and understand the task of recording technographically the world around us — and how we interact with the interfaces at our disposal to do just that. A new media aesthetic? Yes, and probably not just one. Notice that for me the iPhone (and other smartphones) are not just pieces of dead hardware in our hands. Rather, these devices are interfaces, and technology does not point to the sophisticated manipulation of software or hardware.
Self-Porting
I’ve been thinking of self-portraits as self-porting. Such an approach opens the notion of how we port our “selves” through these various technological cultural interfaces. The iPhone, Facebook, Twitter, etc., are all ways through which we pixelate our lives, appear and reappear as if beamed in Star Trek fashion here and there. Components of our lives fragmented into small pieces, daily posts, 144 characters, and image a day… you get it. All these for me point to a visual hermeneutic, a set of practices (quite material) aided and abetted by the various imaging technologies at our disposal. Besides revealing how narcissistic we all are, and how our media require we turn into avatars, how does this constant pixelation shape us? How do we look at ourselves? What do technographically mediated spaces of self-representation reveal about emerging perceptual regimes?
Hence, what used to be self-portraits, with a sense of capturing the “me” at a point in time and space (photography as autobiographical, arresting the moment and capturing our essence), gives way to the different ways in which we are in constant transmission, in flux (pixelated), and mediated through technographic means. If, from an artistic point of view, self-portraiture is rife with the hazards of representing the self, a selfport gives even more relief to the perilous nature of such an undertaking under technological mediation. Dispersed as the subject seems to be into invisible networks, an immediate concern remains how are these works meant to be legible? A self-porting then speaks to a trans-located and hybrid presence, a complex relationship between technographic tools, users, the spaces we inhabit, change, etc.
Self-Porting for me is a turning to look at our ghostly passage through the maze of networks we traverse, a pixelated snap of a moment of passage as seen through, in this case, the iPhone. Self-Ports are not “captures” in the traditional sense, but semi-transmissions — an apparition if you will that exists in many places in cyberspace thus dethroning the sense of “coherent” and static self-grounding of traditional portraiture. How do you port yourself through these cultural (technographic) interfaces? Or perhaps, how are you ported, and how, when, and why, do you seek to capture that haunting presence? In language familiar to Trekkies: how do you beam your decentered, dispersed, and multiplied self up?
Back to the Future
iPhoneography’s lo-fi and “retro” aesthetic managed through digital technographic tools amounts to using the latest cutting edge digital technology to attempt to turn back the clock and replicate a past time as the hip and “in” thing in the present. Not so strange really eh? We’ve always had a fascination with things past, with commemoration, etc. and the remediation goes on. But if what I notice anecdotally even has a shred of value, this is an intriguing move — by which we use a technographic cultural interface like the iPhone to transport us “back to… the future” through a rather strange cultural loop.
Lomographic Pursuits or Lo-Fi
For many iPhoneography is a lomographic pursuit, and various apps seek to emulate such an aesthetic. LoMo refers to Lomography, and Lo-Fi, to low fidelity, in this context of iPhoneography, both refer to the same thing: images generated as casual, snapshot, and in the moment shots, without an overarching sense of having to be “photographically beautiful” by smoothness, or some measure of perfection. In fact, many such shots are or were taken with so called toy cameras — usually made of plastic, with simplistic (or subpar) lenses, and cheap film. Those cameras might have light leaks, or their nature as cheap products introduced all sorts of artifacts to the process of taking and developing the film, giving the resulting shot a distinct “low-fidelity,” marred, or what for some was a “low quality” appearance.
This kind of effort became quite an experimental aesthetic, encouraging photo reportage, candid shooting, and photo verité type of work. In short, it was creative visual expression somewhat free from the constraints imposed by other lofty photography-as-art expectations. There are some Golden Rules to such lomographic efforts (http://www.lomography.com/about), although by far the prime directive seems to be “experiment.” The term Lomography (Lomographic, etc.) is actually a registered trademark of Lomographische AG. More info here.
Will the higher resolution of the iPhone 4 camera change these retro-efforts? Heck, is lomography through the iPhone really about the past?