The Revolution will be televised - iPhone photos become high art (part 1)

A revolution is taking place. Gil Scott Heron once sang: The Revolution will not be Televised. That's not true: mailing and presenting via smart phones IS the revolution. Thereby, it has the rediscovery of photography with the latest modern means at hand. Apple's idea to create a phone that people don't use to speak on the phone most of the time might have changed photography forever.

The world and its shocking and tragic features hasn't changed since the invention of the iPhone since it doesn't solve any of the pressing problems of our planet. Yet it managed to make life a bit more beautiful for people that are mostly without worries anyway. By turning around the motto "form follows function" which is also used for the Bauhaus style, the functions of the iPhone are increasingly changing the forms of day-to-day communication, the side-by-side and perception.
Thus, it was really only a matter of time when photography would be revolutionized by the iPhone due to its captivating mixture of easy use, omnipresence and propagatability.

Elaborate drawing programmes such as Brushes, numerous photo, effect and video programmes, sound and composition programmes - all of these are available for the iPhone. There is (hardly) anything in the everyday life of the affluent citizen that won't be enriched, facilitated or accelerated by an App.

150 million photographers

The Cupertino-based company estimates sales figures of 80 million iPhones in 2011. By now, approximately 90 m iPhones have been sold. An unbelievable number.
If they all begin to be creative because they own a phone that enables them to do so, we will have an art revolution in the Beuys' sense - "Every human being is an artist." In the eyes of Beuys, art should "not remain something retinal". His "expanded understanding of art" refers to human creativity and human work in general.

The iPhone fulfills Beuys' dream of the artist in us

And that's where the iPhone comes into play because it's both: retinal as a photo enabling machine that creates classic "view art", and at the same time within an expanded form of art because everyone can create it by principle - without technical knowledge and even without knowledge on photography or photo design. And the iPhone photography with Apps such as Hipstamatic, Pudding Camera or VintB&W differs from taking photos with other digital cameras.

The owner always carries his iPhone and even without the intention to take photos, this can simply be done everywhere without the need for extensive settings, and with the possibility to edit and distribute the images right away. Blogs for iPhone photographers, websites for photo streams, photo albums and photo contests, for debates - everything for the iPhone.
What the publishing photographers release, could not be further apart from the mobile shots and BILD (German tabloid newspaper; translator'snote) reader reporters out there.
The standards of the pages and the photographers is as high as their willingness to experiment and play in order to bring the photos in line with their and our pictorial memory - both, analogously and digitally.

Impressive, disturbing, beautiful, escalating, dark, associative photo art on everyday life, landscape, people, machines, nights and days, bars and conflict areas is created there. The revolution will be televised!

Part 2: the most important apps, their effects, motifs and styles
Part 3: Interview with a passionate iPhone photographer

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