When you log onto Facebook, you see photos of your friends flashing a big “cheese” in random places. It’s likely that many of those photos were uploaded using an iPhone, the Polaroid of the next generation.
It mimics the Polaroid tradition of using a small, convenient, high quality, instant camera, said Robert Stewart, a professor of photography at SCAD.
iPhone images have become an extension of Polaroid cameras for fine arts photographers, said Stewart. Prior to the era of digital photography, many fine arts photographers rejected Polaroid as a serious fine arts medium while others embraced it.
“The images — particularly the SX-70 images — were beautiful,” Stewart said. “This was a philosophy, an aesthetic, a process of photographing and a way of seeing very different than traditional cameras.”
Photographers like Lucas Samaras, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, Bill Burke, Elsa Dorfman and painter David Hockney all used Polaroids, Stewart pointed out.
With the rise of digital photography, the use of Polaroid film slowly faded. Digital point and shoot cameras were for snapshots and cell phones with cameras were poor quality until the iPhone.
While the number of apps created for the iPhone is overwhelming, there are increasingly more apps for the camera itself, Stewart said.
“You can now work in a version of Photoshop,” he said. “You can draw, paint on the iPhone. You can layer drawings on top of photographs and so on.”
Stewart said he is currently working on two series of images created with an iPhone, both using large prints up to 24 inches by 30 inches.
“They are beautiful. Not beautiful like a photograph taken with a traditional digital camera, beautiful in their own identity,” Stewart said.
Two of his iPhone photographs hang on the fifth floor of Building C. They are images of café table settings with text.
Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series on smartphone trends.