By MICHAEL PERKINS
FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS, THE APP KNOWN AS HIPSTAMATIC BEGAN (in 2009) AS A BIT OF A CARNIVAL TRICK, back when mobile-based platforms for photo processing were the same kind of trendy novelty as custom phone rings. Just as it was fun, in the first heady days of iPhones, to replace the heads of your friends with squirrels or kitties, it was considered "crazy" that an entire app would be dedicated to simulating the look of various analog films or lenses. Hey, this is the digital age. Didn't we just get rid of that stuff. What's next, faux tintypes?
It's Around Here Someplace, 2024. Master shot on an iPhone SE, post-processed with Hipstamatic "Jack London" lens and "Love 81" film filters
Well, of course, those came along, too...but the naysayers missed the point in thinking that a photog would only want to recall the look of Kodachrome or a pinhole lens just for the sheer weirdness of it. Turns out Hipstamatic and its many later imitators filled a need, just as, in another medium, a certain kind of brush or canvas might shape the final iteration of a painting, or a director may deliberately choose black-and-white as the better format for a feature film. Every era in photography has its own look, simply because the qualities, or even limits, of the recording systems in those eras had their own visual signatures. But if all Hipstamatic had provided photographers with was nothing more than the means to make new shots appear old, it would have rapidly faded. Instead, it became an interpretive tool, its digital filters shaping the outcome of pictures instead of just making another "version" of them. That makes Hipstamatic at least as legit for shooters as, say, silkscreening was for Andy Warhol. We're talking tools.
International prizes for photography and journalism of Hipstamatic images by the likes of Francois Besch and the New York Times' Damon Winter, awarded more than ten years ago, are no longer outliers. Certainly, many photo apps in the digital era are one-trick ponies or, worse, mere goofs, but the key to a tool's survival is how many people decide to give it a permanent place in artists' toolbox as a regular go-to or solution. If it's used, it's needed. If it's needed, it stays.
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