The collegehumor video was awesome, thanks khaaan. It hearkened me back to this essay from last year.
I used Hipstamatic for a while, but the desire faded after a couple of months. A few weeks ago I was taking pictures of our 8mo daughter, and my wife asked me why I didn't use Hipstamatic anymore. I snapped a couple of pictures of our daughter with Hipstamatic, and looking at them made me feel a bit disturbed. My daughter is real in a way that collides with the inauthenticity of the Hipstagram filter. It was almost repulsive to me. I might use Hipstamatic from time to time, but I can't see myself taking pictures of my daughter with it.
Holy shit. I just had a revelation. People like Instagram because they grew up with CHEAP old pictures. My parents took most shots with Ektachrome. Other than the color response, the pictures I have of my parents' wedding in 1967 look like they could have been taken yesterday. I shot Velvia and Provia. When I scan my old slides, the difference between what I had and what I have with an Eos 5D is resolution. For me, "Instagram" always meant "I want to make my pictures look cheap and shitty." "Lo-fi" has never had a connection with authenticity for me; rather, it has meant "I don't care enough about this to bother taking a decent picture of it." I've been given two Holgas over the years. I've never used either of them. It's like "why would I bother jumping through ridiculous hoops to get something so shitty looking?" I mean, I've got a fuckin' Pentax 6x7. If I wanna burn 120 film I can make something that looks good.
Are you familiar with Walker Evans? In the latter part of his career he used to do tons of photography on Polaroid. I'm not sure if it was about convenience or effect (Evans had an idea that he could capture bits of time exactly as they were, so part of me thinks he wanted the immediate payoff of Polaroid), but many of his Polaroids have become museum pieces. This was in the days before a Polaroid could represent nostalgia, since Polaroids were new at the time, but they still took shitty quality photos. I think sometimes, in some instances, it really is the aesthetic, and not the nostalgia that drives poor res photography. I'm not saying that this is driving Instagram, but just that it can be a motivating factor sometimes.
As I mentioned in another comment here, I used Hipstamatic for a bit and for the most part was disappointed but with some pictures it works for example, this one: That's my daughter shortly after she was born on Christmas day with my grandfather. I have pictures with myself and my grandfather that look very similar stylistically. For this reason, nostalgia, I absolutely love that photograph. I think some people are nostalgic for the photos of their childhood and others are nostalgic for a time that they never got to experience. That's a big part of fashion in my opinion, is having a nostalgia for something that you never got to experience yourself.
Yeah, see -
Here's a shot I took with a Nikon F5 on Ilford FP4+ through a Red filter in 2001.
Now here's a shot I took with an EOS5D and flipped to high-contrast B&W in Lightroom in 2009.
Other than the resolution, they're syntactically identical. It's just easier for me to take B&W these days than it was 10 years ago. Now here's another. This is a ruin in Peru taken by my mother in 1966:
This is a ruin in New mexico taken by me in 2011:
Color cast may be due to altitude; the New Mexico ruin is at 9,000 feet while the Peruvian one is at 14 or so. But other than that, once you crunch the resolutions down to something similar, it's the same photo. So I guess I grew up with photographers, and our photos weren't shitty, so "shitty photos" weren't nostalgic, they were bad.
I think there's a certain element of the natural aging of a photo, like when a photo fades on a shelf. I get a little nostalgic when I see photos that are a bit washed out because my great grandmother had photos of she and her husband that had been on the same shelf for years and had been faded by the sun coming through a window. For some reason I equate some of these filters with the look of those photos.
Enjoyed the photos, thanks. It's funny what becomes "nostalgia" and what becomes repellant. "shitty photos" as you describe them do feel like part of my childhood. I would include polaroids in there too and those old school hanimex cameras (see below) I think of these things along the same lines as shag carpet, cigarette purses (little coozies for your smokes that were all the rage), Stained glass lamps etc. All things I have a fond nostalgia for but then there is the cigarette smoke, the shitty jug wine that I have no nostalgia for but were equally as pervasive back then. Hell, this has been a fun post. I've enjoyed this run down memory lane. Makes me want to play horse shoes, use an encyclopedia to source information and go night swimming. --and take "shitty photos" of it all.
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Well said, I had the exact same experience. When our daughter was born I had just gotten the Hipstamatic app (as a referral from you, I think) and I took a ton of photos with it. Some are great because it was around Christmas time and it made some photos seem appropriately "old timey". But I've not used it in a long while. You can always ad a filter later on if you'd like, no need to lock in to one. edit: I can remember being young and seeing photos of my fathers childhood. The black and white and sepia tones were clear indicators of a bygone time. I wonder if these filters are throwing a monkey wrench in to that? Will our grand children one day see the photos of their parents birth and have a false sense of how long ago that was? Fads come and go and I could see this whole "hipster photography" thing fading away.
There has been a definite backlash against nostalgic filters bubbling throughout the blogs. This essay explores more deeply than any of the articles I've read (would not be surprised if it spawned all those blog posts). I'm not so down on them, -nostalgia feels nice. But even from the first I didn't like (and therefore use) the vast majority of the filters, and every pic I took I generally saved an unprocessed copy if possible. I much prefer post-shot filtering apps like Camera+ to the ones that preprocess every pic you take. More control. For the past year I've been thinking that there is a great opportunity for a photo app that focused strictly on black and white photography. One with filters that focused on a range of processing involving things like contrast, brightness, white balance, etc. B&W always looks good, and if you could do a live or post filter that quickly let people quickly edit/process them, you'd have a really useful app that produced consistently quality results.