‘It may seem odd to start a piece for a ranting slot by saying how much I love something, but I love photography and I particularly love the way social networking means I can share my photographs and the way I can keep up with friends through their shared images.
But I deeply dislike Instagram, which is the sharing app that millions of people seem to prefer. Indeed, Facebook loves Instagram so much that it is bidding $1bn (£637m) to buy it (assuming the UK’s Office of Fair Trading doesn’t block it, of course).
Every day my Twitter stream and my Facebook newsfeed are full of Instagram images, all sporting the cutesy faux-Polaroid filters and ragged white borders added by the iPhone or Android app.’
‘There’s an interesting discussion that suggests the aim is to make our photographs stand out among the zillion or so that get posted every day: are we striving for an authenticity in an age when the sheer quantity of images by definition devalues our pictures?’
– Kate Bevan for the Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/jul/19/instagram-debasing-real-photography
Bevan makes an interesting point about forcing an image to look older so that it’s more individual, we are so used to taking hundreds of photos digitally waiting for one to be perfect – that this quick effect can make one of these hundreds that is typically bland stand out. These strange little filters can make a very cliche image of what your having for lunch look very artistically lit and considered, but unfortunately I don’t think it’s fooling anyone.
Photography & Critical Theory 