nudawn:

taking an iphone shot (a few times just to make sure it looks right) that looks like a polaroid will never replace the experience of taking that shot and waiting for the film to develop in front of your eyes… and seeing what you get.  its a gamble, and takes skill, and can never be recreated.  its about that moment.  it makes for a richer and more interesting photograph, because of what it means.

I totally agree and then kinda disagree. I mean, yes, definitely - I hate the fuck out of these iPhone apps and Logic plug-ins and Photoshop actions to distress your 21 megapixel photos and 96kHz recordings and reduce them to Lomo / 4-track quality shit - if you want a Holga, be a shameless hipster and go to fucking Urban Outfitters and pay 300% markup like everyone else. If Carolingian monks had InDesign and a nice H&FJ typeset, do you think they would be “distressing” their manuscripts with lame ass deviant art brushes? We’ve come to a point where cleanliness is so easily attainable that people with no style substitute faux nostalgia, which is silly and sad. David Carson changed the game in a big way, but instead of building on his style, everyone found different ways to poorly imitate it with the technology he had [to an extant] critiqued - grunge for the sake of grunge, push-button punk rock, whatever.

As for the false reality of retouched photographs, even those have become so clichéd and ugly in their facade that their sterility has been rejected by photographers like Terry Richardson and Juergen Teller and publications such as Nylon… which I guess leads to the disagreement part. Terry Richardson shot Yashica T4s because his eyes were too bad to focus the Hasselblads and Mamiyas that everyone else was using. His personality, though, superseded the technology and made his pictures about a moment and an emotion more than a pristine chrome, so while everyone scrambled to replicate his “look” they missed the point - that his pictures are more than a sum of their technical attributes or medium.

Photographs obviously exist with some sort of context - a Sally Mann picture takes on a completely different meaning if you don’t know their background, or a Glenn Ligon image if you don’t know about the author, but for art that is not deliberately informed by its creator’s traits it becomes too often a lazy excuse that the image is reliant on context. Successful visual media should be able to engage a viewer in a vacuum - the moment, the story, the sentiment captured - may all be relevant but if they are the driving force of a piece then that image is merely a relic of something else and should be treated as such.  I agree that polaroids hold a certain beauty and immediacy and I love them dearly just as I love the tactile nature of all of my film and film-based cameras, but I’m not a big fan of fetishizing the medium because too often an uninspired photograph (or sound) relies on the “coolness” of its medium to give it relevance, which pushes it back inline with the camerabag app. I don’t know, maybe I just don’t like that they’ve become a fashion accessory.  Someone once responded (I think it was Gary Winogrand, but I can’t remember) when asked what was his favorite camera, “the one that’s in my hand.”

I’m all about telling a story with a photograph, It’s kinda my thing, and the medium may affect the method, the process, but when it comes to the product I don’t grade on a curve - a polaroid may have been necessary to capture an intimate moment (Christopher Makos?) but the result itself doesn’t gain any style points for being a tiny, warped, blown-out exposure.