Hipstamatic War Photography: Pros vs Cons

Hipstamatic War Photography.. Where do I even start?


I recently wrote a uni essay on this topic, specifically on whether or not the use of Hipstamatic is acceptable when it comes to documentary photography, and I'm afraid I can't answer with a simple yes or no. What started off as a simple picture story by Damon Winter, became the topic of numerous arguments and caused controversy for its unusual medium (iphone) and editing (Hipstamatic).


                                   

Damon Winter was awarded 3rd place from Pictures of the Year International, and his story was even featured on the front page of The New York Times, which angered a substantial amount of people. Most of them argue that due to the rise of social media in the past few years, photography has become an utter joke. “What we knew as photojournalism at its purest form is over and POYI just killed it,” Chip Litherland said on his blog. “Well, they didn’t kill it so much as just dig another knife deeper into the back of its decaying corpse.” Many photographers/reporters believe that a photojournalistic image should show real mood and emotions, and most definitely not use prefixed filters to make it look ‘pretty’. Nick Stern, an internationally acclaimed News and features photographer, felt very strongly about this. In his CNN post he writes: “Every time a news organization uses a Hipstamatic or Instagram-style picture in a news report, they are cheating us all. It’s not the photographer who has communicated the emotion into the images. It’s not the pain, the suffering or the horror that is showing through. It’s the work of an app designer in Palo Alto who decided that a nice shallow focus and dark faded border would bring out the best in the image... The image never existed in any other place than the eye of the app developer.”

                                   

Other photojournalists seem to completely disagree with Litherland and Stern. Benjamin Lowry, a New York based photographer, argues with Stern over the widely known social network Twitter. He claims that “it's not the price of the camera, but the content of the image that makes the story.” Others, while on a heated Twitter argument, state that the decision to use Hipstamatic is no different than the decision to use Black and White film, as they both have to do with the aesthetics of the photograph and not the content. As long as the content is not manipulated and is constant then the aesthetics of the photograph should not matter. A number of amateur photographers said that photojournalists that document the same event often end up having undistinguishable photographs, therefore the option to use Hipstamatic or Instagram creates something different to the others’ photographs, and ends up being more memorable.


Whether one chooses to agree with the argument that Hipstamatic and Instagram photographs should only be used by amateur everyday people or with the argument that the apps give character to the photographs even though they’re documentary, the only certain thing is that this will not be the last of Hipstamatic/Instagram professional photography. It has already won over the internet, or at least became a trending topic all over social media, and even made its way onto the front page of The New York Times. One should expect that this is only the beginning.