Wednesday

Searching for Answers and Meaning on Mobile Photography


The last six to eight weeks I have been reading on the subject of photography, considering I have started to question the future of photography and especially mobile photography and what it represents as a whole as a photographic medium.


While many recently published books on photography finally addressing the time period between 2000 to 2005, I have yet to come across a book dealing with mobile photography, other then just being an artists’ picture book or ‘How To’ manipulate mobile images. Even photographic magazines have not addressed mobile photography impact on social, political or anthropological issues or the general influences of mobile photography on photography as a medium.




Yes, these are academic questions and concerns which the greater majority of photographers are not interested in learning about or even discussing, but I find that mobile photography is having a major impact on our daily lives, that we need to have this discussion. We especially need to discuss mobile photography as a medium and the various directions it is taking on as an artistic platform, in order to properly educate individuals interested in using mobile as a personal artistic form of expressing a though or an idea.


Currently mobile photography is more than just a way to capture something one sees, for it is not only a still camera, it is also a video camera, but it does not end there, especially since one is able to alter digitally either form into a personal expression of art. 


Like all forms of art, mobile photography has not been defined or categorized into the various artistic mediums, as most mobile photographers blindly lunge forward having no idea as to the foundation and fundamentals of a specific diversion of the photographic medium. 


Mobile photography is ground braking in so many ways it can easily compare to one of the greatest upsets in paintings history, when Impressionists took on the establishment and altered our perception of the medium and from that point on opened up an entire artistic revolution that continued into the 1950s.




We are now revolutionising photography as a medium, branching off into various groups with no real consensus, especially whether an altered photograph is still a photograph or becomes a collage, or even a multi-medium art form.


At the moment I am only raising questions, while I search through the many layers of history and opinions on photography in general, therefore not offering any answers. Even if I produce in the near future some of my findings as possible answers, they are only opinions, since no discussions have taken place with other individuals interested in establishing guidelines for mobile future and a genuine foundation on which one can build on and thereby securing mobile art as a true and viable artistic medium.


For now I remain singular in my quest but I sincerely hope that very soon others will begin to question mobile photography and it’s relationship with fine art photography, including that as a social medium.



All photographs taken with an iPhone 5S
©2015 Egmont van Dyck - All Rights Reserved







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