The Instagram Effect - Polarizing Photographers
Friday, October 7, 2011 at 09:55AM 
Most people have a strong opinion about Instagram and the dozens of other apps which quickly apply retro photo effects to an image and, perhaps more importantly, publish them instantly to the website of your choice.
Many purists despise Instagram as a gimmick that cheapens the art of either creating retro images the old-fashioned way, using Lomos, Polaroids or what have you, cross processing film, or partially exposing film to light. Those in the digital world often feel the same way, except that they feel a generic Instagram filter creates a generic retro effect.
The fact of the matter is many photographers love Instagram for its ability to take even a mundane image and make it palatable, at least at first glance.
Being neither a purist or an Instagram fan, I decided to take an analytical approach to the subject. Why do purists dislike tools like Instagram so much? And why do “Instagrammers” (for lack of a better word) love their app so much that they seem to apply it to nearly every image they shoot on their IPhones?
I believe the most basic argument against Instagram is the cheapening of the process. I hate to say it, but photographers can often be like magicians; we do not want the secrets of our trade known to everyman. There is a certain sense of pride we have in being able to create an image, and that pride is pummeled when some noob with a 99 cent app can approximate the same effect with a couple taps on his iPhone screen.
Instagrammers love their app for the basic reason that it gives them a quick and easy way to enhance a photo that quite simply wouldn’t be very interesting otherwise. How many pictures do we need to see of people’s lunches and sleeping dogs anyway? At least with Instagram, we can see their chicken caesar salad as an aging Polaroid.
In defense of Instagrammers, I know some very talented visual artists who actually take good pictures (by good, I mean well composed and thought out) and apply Instagram filters to them. If you look at Instagram from a purely technical standpoint, it is no less of a photography tool than Photoshop. Photoshop is obviously more powerful and customizable, but the results are basically the same: to change an image in a positive visual way. Those of us who use Photoshop and curse Instagram are being a bit hypocritical.
The Instagram effect has its positives as well. First and foremost, it pushes visual artists who have been resting on the laurels of retro-styled images to find a new form of art. Art is always about pushing envelopes and when the masses are now able to create retro images of what they see in their rear-view mirror, it is time for the true artists to move on. Second, and let’s face it, some of the retro styles that have become popular today are things that would have been tossed in the trash outside the darkroom 20 years ago. By accelerating the pace of adoption of retro images, Instagram also accelerates their demise. Good riddance.
Finally, it is important to remember that what a photographer can do with a one-click app is not the same as what he can do in Photoshop, nor the same as what he could do with a Polaroid SX-70 and a pack of expired Polaroid 600 film. To say that an Instagram image will be as good as the same image worked on carefully in Photoshop with multiple layers or shot analog with nature and chemistry having their say in the final image is like saying a Rolex watch is the same as the “Rolox” you bought in some back alley in Hong Kong.
What are your thoughts on the great Instagram debate? The iPhone Killer App? Fad de jour? Proof that Armageddon is near?
apps, art, artist, awesome, debate, instagram, photo tools, retro, sucks in Photography