Full Circle

James and I were talking this lunchtime about the insane power and capabilities of my new iPhone 16 Pro's camera system and the soft/firmware that enables it to function as it does. Technically it's a masterpiece, offering not only a proper optical zoom with a decent range, but a selection of prime focal lengths with which to work. It has 'styling' features in abundance, equivalent to choosing one's film stock, and a very clever real-time 'aperture' control that allows one to adjust the apparent depth of field, from deep, stopped-down territory for maximum detail to pretty shallow, allowing the isolation of a plane of the image for emphasis.

James pointed out that are filters now commonly available on numerous platforms and softwares that 'replicate' the differential focus of a wide open lens to give a 'classic' portrait view; but as he pointed out, anyone that has any real experience of 'proper' photography can quickly spot the software-generated artifice; and I can only agree with him: even though he has grown up in the digital photography era - although he has shot a little actual film in his youth - his praxis is essentially analogue in nature, relying on the lens to effect the nature of any particular shot, just as in the chemical photography world in which I used to operate.

Our thoughts turned to what actually makes a photograph 'real' to us, and our consensus [of two: father & son] was that 'hyperreality' in an image or video - as afforded by the everyday technology of the smartphone - is exactly that: unreal and curated by software, and is plainly obvious as such. James now always takes his digital imaging down a notch in post to make it more human; taking off some of the artificial gloss and glitz afforded by the machine in order to render it somehow more 'real'. This of course throws up some very interesting questions about something I've posted about before and actually quite recently: the veracity of the photographic image. The fact is, that almost no-one using their phones to take photographs these days actually takes images that are in any sense completely real analogues of the world they perceive.

In the world of the filtered selfie or the perfect holiday photograph, the fantasy of one's life's perfection holds sway, and the technology to achieve that fantasy is in the palm of one's hand, with the increasingly powerful and sophisticated hardware and software there to do one's bidding; or so one might think. Decision making in the image realm is now incredibly mediated by the technology itself, giving you what you want rather than what actually is: all very subtle and for the most part trivial in its purpose, but what it leaves you with at the end of it all is not anything documentary of the moment, but an interpretation of that moment by a third party: the camera/software itself. Is this a totally negative situation? Have we in some ways made ourselves totally subservient in the process? Well yes, and no...

The history of human self-documentation via the medium of photography is really only just over a century and bit long, and came about through the auspices of the Kodak company and their democratisation of photography around the turn of the twentieth century: '...you press the button, we'll do the rest...', taking image-making into the mass market for the first time. Prior to that, photography was very much the realm of at first the wealthy experimenter and later the professional photographer, whose services could only be afforded by those sufficiently well-off to pay their fees. From those early Kodak days until the advent of the digital realm, and more particularly the development of the modern smartphone, the veracity of a photograph was never really questioned in any general sense: a picture was always considered to be a one-to-one analogue of the subject represented. Which probably explains why most people hated having their photograph taken: they didn't like what they saw.

This may well have been at the heart of the cultural resistance then prevalent to acknowledge photography as an art form, rather than simply a mechanical process, despite the efforts of some to employ more obviously painterly approaches to their photography, particularly in its earliest days. But the thing that strikes me most about this dichotomy between veracity and interpretation, if you like, is that most people's requirements of their photography these days echoes those of the pre-photographic era, when portraits or landscapes or whatever would be commissioned of artists in order to satisfy the vanities and fantasies of the commissioners themselves, seeking the most self-satisfying image possible. These days you simply take a selfie or photograph your meal/villa/beach etc., and let the camera take the role of the artist of yore to make the best of it for you. There you go: what goes around, comes around, people...