With almost everyone having a cell phone and thusly a camera, everyone in public runs the chance of being visually documented. A more populist, mob version of the 1984 that George Orwell predicted. People may start to “act” all the time. This is extreme and presently unlikely. But has the complete ubiquity of cameras – not as cameras, but as part of something else (a phone) – given photography as art, or otherwise, an even longer tail than before? – Gabriel McIntosh
Jörg Holtkamp - Düsseldorf/Germany
is a new (the first issue has just been released) online pdf based magazine all about mobile phone photography. Contributors for the first issue are from places as diverse as Malaysia, Philippines and Germany. Featured photographer Jonathas Mello explains the attraction of cell phone technology, “With a cell phone we have much more opportunities and angles to take pictures. Even at a bus trip, when bored somewhere or at an unexpected sunshine we have cell phone and digital memory to experiment new approaches to a theme.”
Shawn Rocco - Raleigh/USA
There’s also contributions from other curators of online mobile phone photographs such as
Cellular Obscura and Garden Apt. Gabriel McIntosh of
Garden Apt contributes with a lengthy interview on the low-fi/hi-tech combination, “The photographs are even truer to life than more accurate and precise photographs made with more tradition tools. It is in a sense reality photography, like reality television. Mobile phone photography becomes cultural hi-fidelity due to it’s very perceived authenticity and yet, simultaneously low-fidelity because the images are pixilated and of low technologically quality.”
Jonathas Mello - Florianópolis/Brazil
We’ve got our own budding cell-phone shutterbugs which you can check out
here. Download the first issue of I CAN SEE PIXELS,
here. Below, a cameraphone photo of a dead bird run through nine Photoshop filters.
