The Unseen Photographer :: Poker Faces

I've been intending to write this post for awhile now. To delay any longer would be negligence on my part, since I think the subject is somewhat time sensitive. It goes without saying that I am not the first to postulate on the topic of cell phone photography, but it is something that comes to mind often, and that I was reminded of recently while visiting the SFMOMA where they have an excellent exhibition called "Exposed: voyeurism, surveillance, and the camera since 1870".

The following is a breakdown of my musings inspired by the aforementioned exhibit, and my recent forays into cell phone photography:
 

Thesis: Phone cameras could be to contemporary street photography, what the 35mm in the hands of Walker Evans was to the street photography of the 30's.

Relevance: In a time when phone cameras have become relatively powerful, yet are still not recognized as cameras by a majority of the world's population, there is a brief window into a new realm of photographic possibilities. In a sense it is a voyeuristic window, but not in the perverted sense that we associate with "voyeurism". Rather it is a chance to take photos that we would not normally take with an SLR - whether because SLR's are prohibited, or because pulling out a large camera would in some way disturb the subject and alter the scene, or simply because the most readily available camera is our cell phone.

Experiment: The experience that got me thinking about this took place in an old cafe in Missoula, MT that runs a poker table into the wee hours of the morning. Cameras are strictly forbidden there - a rule which is enforced. However I soon found that my iPhone was seen as just a phone. No negative camera associations. Over the course of a couple weeks, I alternately lost and won large stacks of chips, ate too many plates of gravy smothered hash browns, and earned the nick name the "cell phone kid" at the poker table. I was addicted though, and not just to the gambling and gravy, but to the thrill of capturing something that I had a feeling no one had captured before (at least not here, not with these old characters). While everyone thought I was busy texting or playing games on my phone, I was able to snap the following set of images. Shots that could never have been taken with a 35mm camera.

Conclusion: While you can debate the artistic or journalistic merit of these photographs, I am sharing them in the hopes that they will spark your curiosity (as they have mine) to explore what seems to be a unique window of time in the life of photography, in which many of us carry a "camera" that is not in the eyes of others a "camera" and thus has given us a new outlet through which to free our vision and bring to light scenes which would otherwise be very difficult if not impossible to capture...

The images above were taken using an iPhone4, and the Hipstamatic app. 

Note: The inspiration for the title of this post comes from the following excerpt pertaining to the SFMOMA exhibit, "Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the camera since 1870".

"The Unseen Photographer"

"Photography has been central to voyeuristic looking since 1871, the year in which the gelatin dry plate was invented and cameras became small enough to be secreted in books, clothing, shoes, pistols, or canes. Although most "detective cameras" were advertised as harmless amusements for amateurs, the public found them troubling from the start, raising concerns about privacy that remain valid to this day. This section of the exhibition traces the use of the hidden camera in public spaces, from the turn-of-the-century amateur picture makers Paul Martin and Horace Engle, to modernist photographers Walker Evans and Weegee and contemporary artists such as Philip-Lorca diCorcia, whose series Heads, featured here, famously inspired a privacy lawsuit in 2006."

Source: http://www.sfmoma.org/press/releases/exhibitions/830#ixzz1E7yc3SRS

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art