Cell Phone Photography

2005, near St. Peter's Basillica.
Pope John Paul II's body being carried for public viewing.
Luca Bruno, AP

2013, St. Peter's Basillica.
Pope Francis makes his inaugural appearance.
Michael Sohn, AP

The integration of cameras into cell phones is shaping how we document our lives. The ability to take digital photos permits the creation of an essentially unlimited number of photos. Aside from using the local storage space on the phone itself--which is entirely reusable--cell phones have the ability to upload images directly to the internet, or to a remote storage location. The mentality of "wasting film" has never been so foreign.

The cell phone has become a permanent fixture in our daily lives, and the fact that cameras have been integrated into almost every phone has by extension placed a camera in the hands of nearly every cell phone user. Several years ago, we may have had to decide whether or not to take our cameras to an event, but now we are almost never without one. It is now the norm that at any given moment a camera is in our pocket ready to record. Services like Instagram and Facebook have capitalized on this new phenomenon, providing an outlet for the continuous stream of photos we are creating with our smart phones. As of January of 2013, Facebook hosted over 240 billion photos [1]. In contrast, the Library of Congress holds a mere 13.6 million photos [2]. From the mundane to the extraordinary, we are snapping photos of any and every experience and instantly displaying it online for millions to see.

Although we are creating photos at an unprecedented rate, it may be argued that we may be, ironically, transforming into a culture that does not truly appreciate the photograph. Because it is now so tremendously easy to capture the moment, little thought is given before snapping a photo. Not only do we not have to worry about wasting shots, but the functions of operating the camera settings are almost fully automated. No risk and relatively little skill are involved in taking one or two or a hundred shots of one object or event. The practice of snapping a photo has become less methodical and more haphazard. With the absence of restraint and need for careful consideration of composition and exposure factors, this cavalier attitude and the tendency to photograph with a hasty impulsiveness results in an increasing number of photographs that we don't necessarily want or need, and photos we may never even look at again. And because of the virtually unlimited storage space, we do not always feel compelled to delete the dozens of duplicate and inadequate photos.

On the other hand, a camera phone in the hands of almost every person opens up the opportunity for us to document all aspects of more significant events and share it instantly with the world. It is true that arguably mediocre cell phone photos saturate the internet on a daily basis, but when a truly historic event occurs, a surge of rampant photographic coverage of that event is immediately available to the world via social media sites, raw and uncensored. For example, even in 2001, before media outlets like Facebook and Twitter, and before cell phones even had cameras, the events of 9/11 were recorded by citizens from multiple angles and uploaded to the web, making it one of the most documented events in history. If such an event were to happen today, when smart phones are in nearly everyone's pockets, equipped to take not only still photos but high definition video, the amount of documentation would be monumental, and much of it would be shared to the web nearly instantly.

The combination of constant access to a camera, uninhibited picture taking, and the tendency to never delete extraneous pictures results in, for better or worse, an unprecedented accumulation of photos stored on mobile devices and all over the web. With Instagram users sharing 40 million photos per day from their smart phones [3], the concept of the photograph as a medium to document only memorable things is clearly an idea of the past. But even though the commonplaceness of the camera phone has certainly changed the way we take and perceive photos, it hasn't necessarily cheapened the value of the photograph itself. The ability for multiple people to prolifically document and share truly memorable events as they happen, as in the photographs above, is a remarkable progression in technology. So the effect of the camera phone on photography is twofold. It has expanded the spectrum of the medium to include an abundance of both banality and widespread photojournalism.

"Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph." - Susan Sontag

References

[1] Wilhelm, Alex. "Facebook: Our 1 billion users have uploaded 240 billion photos, made 1 trillion connections". The Next Web. http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2013/01/15/facebook-our-1-billion-users-have-uploaded-240-billion-photos-made-1-trillion-connections/

[2] "Fascinating Facts". Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/about/facts.html

[3] Etherington, Darrell. "Instagram Reports 90M Monthly Active Users, 40M Photos Per Day And 8500 Likes Per Second". TechCrunch. http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/17/instagram-reports-90m-monthly-active-users-40m-photos-per-day-and-8500-likes-per-second/

Photos from: Dellaverson, Carlo. "Witnessing papal history changes with digital age". NBC News. http://photoblog.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/14/17312316-witnessing-papal-history-changes-with-digital-age?lite