The Instagram Effect - Polarizing Photographers

Happy Trails
Originally uploaded by Ame Otoko

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?

Digital vs. Film - Why Both Must Co-Exist

A recent article I found on the web wonders how much longer photographic film can survive in this exceedingly digital world we live in. The topic comes up many times as sales of film rapidly decline and less and less businesses exist to actually develop and print your film. So in the battle between digital and film, it looks like digital has its opponent on the ropes.

Not so fast, I say. I believe we are oversimplifying the issue by even comparing the digital and film processes. Digital photography and film based photography can and should co-exist, and let me tell you why.

The false assumption when comparing digital and film is that the ultimate product, the photographic print, is exactly the same for both processes. However, if art teaches us anything, it is that the process itself lends itself to the finished product. For example, you can draw a portrait using colored pencils or you can paint the same portrait using watercolors. Even if you tried to make the images look the same, there would be some obvious differences in the finished products because the process of drawing with a pencil is very different from the process of painting with a brush.

Digital photography and software based editing tools such as Photoshop helped democratize the creative process around photography. You no longer needed fancy equipment in a darkroom and hundreds of hours of classroom training to create some amazing effects with your photographs. In that sense, digital photography was a revolution for the “Everyman” photographer and a huge time-saver for the professional photographer. However, digital photography is closer to science than art in the sense that if you write down your settings (or create scripts) you can duplicate your effect perfectly.

Now think about the process of taking an image from unexposed film to print in a darkroom setting. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of variables that change the outcome of your final image: chemical temperatures and dilutions, light leaks, emulsion imperfections, just to name a few. You could take a photo of the exact same subject and from development to print, you would never get the exact same result.

This randomness of consistency is what is currently driving the revival of lo-fi equipment like Holga and the popularity of the much-inferior Instagram, which is merely a digital representation of a process that is by nature very analog. People dig imperfection. That’s what makes us human and it makes our images human.

My point is this: the digital photography and film-based photography processes are so vastly different they should both be considered art forms in their own rights. You may be a Photoshop wizard who can’t even burn a print in a darkroom. Great - be the best digital photographer you can be. Or you may be an old school darkroom jockey whose clothes always smell like “fix” who doesn’t even know how to download images off an SD card. Awesome - go out and create the richest images you can.

I realize there are economic factors which may decide the fate of photographic film in the long run. But I believe as long as there are people who are willing to pay to keep an art form alive, film-based photography can and should live forever right alongside digital photography.