I made a point to not take a camera to my wife's uncle's retirement party, as I didn't want to get roped into being the official photo geek. But the light washing across the Chinese food debris was compelling. I had my iPhone. It has a camera in it.
The quality of the iPhone camera is so bad that it falls into the "art" camera category (Holga, Lensbaby, et. al.). Compelling images can be made with little effort, because of the instant "weird" gauze. I don't know if I'm proud of these photos, as it brings up the issue of what made the aesthetic decision here. Not me. The camera's quirks dominate the visual field. But then again, it's like any other tool used to mediate reality--you become conversant in the way your tool converts reality into something else, and learn to manipulate that to some other end. Conventional, straight photography is no less artificial a window through which to perceive reality. We just have a more widespread convention that "this" is what a photograph looks like. And now, we have this other "this" available in millions of hands: our cell phones.
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