Take An Object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.

 

Object: A Snapchat selfie
Alteration #1: Added a black and white filter
Alteration #2: Added text

I must admit, Snapchat is one of my guilty pleasures. As a photographer, I do enjoy quality photographs, but every once and a while it's nice to embrace the amateur side of digital photography. For some photographers, mobile phone photography is where they share their work and gain followers. Phone nowadays capture more megapixels than the first dSLR cameras-- the iPhone 6 can get up to 10 MP with as low as a 1.8/f aperture! This can prove slightly frustrating for a digital photographer who has spent so much on quality equipment that an amateur can surpass their technical quality in a photograph.

Then again, the quality of a photograph isn't always in the megapixels. Some art is created with an amateur feel on purpose by using very expensive equipment, but you wouldn't know that by just looking at the photograph.

In the mobile app Snapchat, if you customize your original image with text or drawings and you try to exit the image, it asks you: "Are you sure you want to abandon your Snapsterpiece" to avoid discarding any valuable edits to your photograph. A Snapsterpiece. Huh. A play on words of masterpiece, as if anyone spends that much time illustrating or writing over a photograph on a photo sharing app that deletes the image after a few seconds, never to be seen again, not to mention referring to those edits as a Snapsterpiece.

It's difficult to be a photographer in the real world since everyone with a camera-possessing smartphone thinks that an Instagram or VSCO Cam filter will turn their mediocre photograph into a work of art. Or perhaps they actually may have taken a breathtaking, emotion-filled camera on an iPhone camera, for example. But why? Why don't they take it on a traditionally quality camera?

Can they not afford it? Are they trying to prove a point? Do they think this makes them edgy? I honestly don't know. To be honest, I just try taking a photo of something that is aesthetically pleasing if I don't have my dSLR at my disposal or I'm just literally taking a selfie. But it still peaks my interest, when do these photographs become art (if they even do)? How many filters will it take? How make doodles, how much text? Is this a new digital age of reproduction as mentioned by Walter Benjamin (in reference to his mechanical age of reproduction)? These are all questions I am curious about-- in the meantime, I'll keep taking cute selfies until I understand what is up with smartphone photographs and art.