For our first crit at school the other day someone bought in a whole bunch of phonecam shots. Strangely enough I could see a connection between her B&W images and her phonecam, near narative, set. Both had a very personal feel but in different ways.
Saw this on Boing Boing, an online collection of publicly contributed phonecam shots. Contributed to by all sorts of unlikely types, including Weird Al!! And ex-trekker uber-geek Wil Wheaton. More a collection of non-artist icons, than your traditional artist types by the looks of it.
I was discussing with Heather the effects of phone cams on Art. With a sort of pseudo-moore’s law phone cams ought to have the quivalent of large format resolution cameras in them within 20 years. What will that do with so many cameras around? Will it make any difference?
My contentious point though is that photography is not about taking pictures, it’s about not taking pictures, or at least pretending that you havent taken them. Editing is the key, take Robert Frank, 28,000 images pared down to an esential 83 for his “The Americans.” Every photographer’s work appears as if they are the only pieces in existence, when in fact there will be a huge body of material that didn’t make it to the final stage. Editing and process are thus hugely important and only more so with more images becoming available.
