snapshots are the new screenshots
But what do things look like photographed? Winogrand’s maxim suggests that photographability is an opportunity for discovery, that the camera creates the possibility of new perspectives and encounters with the world. One might think that an increased capacity for people to photograph things would lead to a variety of vantages. With smartphone photography, however, “what something will look like” is increasingly being wrangled into fixed notions of what a photograph should look like.
Last week, Kyle Chayka devoted his New Yorker column to the ways smartphone software attempts to make photos well-lit and pleasant-looking, often against the photographer’s intentions. He explains some of the digital processing of recent iPhone models:
the camera creates as many as nine frames with different levels of exposure. Then a “Deep Fusion” feature, which has existed in some form since 2019, merges the clearest parts of all those frames together, pixel by pixel, forming a single composite image. […] The iPhone camera also analyzes each image semantically, with the help of a graphics-processing unit, which picks out specific elements of a frame—faces, landscapes, skies—and exposes each one differently.
Chayka is understandably frustrated by these features, which “improve” photographs with an uneven tyranny. Chayka finds that the automatic exposures “creat[e] skies that resemble the supersaturated horizons of an anime film or a video game.” He talks to several photographers annoyed at the iPhone’s constant overcorrection of creative intent, concluding that “The ‘fix’ ends up creating a distortion more noticeable than whatever perceived mistake was in the original.”
As if smartphone fatigue was in the air last week, Charlie Warzel also ruminated in his Atlantic newsletter about the thousands of photos on his phone. Riffing on a WIRED piece by Drew Austin, Warzel writes about the odd solace he finds in his immense, subscription-supported, cloud-based personal archive of smartphone photos:
Occasionally I would page through the 26,224 photos in my library (which my phone refers to, quite generously, as “Recents”) to find something from a few years back, and the act of rapid scrolling would blur and shift the mosaic. I noticed while swiping that, without seeing individual photos, this specific document of my life had different eras with distinct color palettes.
For Warzel, the act of taking and keeping iPhone photos has far less to do with photographing the world than with generating “this mosaic of my life” in his Photos app. Roland Barthes may have called cameras “clocks for seeing,” but likely would have been startled by Warzel’s photo-feed blurring, which is not really about seeing at all, only keeping an approximate sense of time.
Both Chayka and Warzel, writing from different ends of the photographic process, are preoccupied by the proprietary technologies that define our production and consumption of photographs, which in turn shape our processing of memory and time. Chayka worries that the iPhone camera is simply becoming a bad product: attempting to give even the worst photo a professional-looking sheen, it produces laughable and frustrating distortions, watercolor effects, and unwanted exposures. Worse, it discourages creativity: attempts at creating an effect that isn’t in line with Apple’s narrow notion of “good photography” are corrected. Winograndian wonder is quashed by enforced expectations of quality.
Warzel, less concerned with the operations of the camera itself, still worries about the implications of seemingly infinite storage and the capacity to photograph anything at any time:
For me, iPhone photos have become more about the action of taking them than what I do with them. They’re meant, instead, to add texture to that near-infinite scroll of the camera roll. They’re meant, probably, as proof that I’m alive and in the world. They’re meant for the mosaic. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it’s definitely a product of being able to take and save as many as I could ever want to.
I don’t know if it’s good or bad either, but the accumulation of photographs into a bottomless reel of self-affirmation doesn’t really seem like a personal archive at all. Perhaps “Recents” actually is more fitting a name than library: more than archives to be curated and passed down, our smartphone photo-reels act as memory banks and visual aids for personal narratives. Proof less of the world than of our perceived place in it.
Looking through my own Camera Roll, my recent photos make a lackluster mosaic of reminders, memes, and information. Even the most recent “actual” photographs—photographs of things in the world—function more like screenshots of reality than photographs in their own right. For instance, on a recent trip to the Morgan Library, I took a snap of Holbein’s Dance of Death engravings and one stanza2 from a Woody Guthrie song about New York. They aren’t good photos; they exist to remember what I saw, to document that I was there, to keep a record of my preferences. Another “actual” photo is from a party last weekend, but it’s blurry and illegible, ruined by my phone’s unwarranted attempt to make it brighter.
Distorted by unseen processes and aggregated into private, paid-for platforms, our photo libraries seem more and more like weird, kaleidoscopic consumer products. Snapshots function like screenshots and vice versa: we photograph so that we can upload information or remember something later, so that we can see our lives in colored blurs as we lie in bed and scroll.
ben tapeworm