[PHOTO] On how Instagram's good for photography

[rfmcdonald]

Facebook's Michael linked to this article from today's BBC Magazine, written by photographer Stephen Dowling, decrying the increasingly popular photo app Instagram in the aftermath of its purchase by Facebook. For Dowling, it seems, it all comesdown to Instagram's apps.

Instagram - and its bedfellows such as Hipstamatic, Camerabag and Picplz - have brought to digital photography a fever for a certain style of imagery.

Smartphone photos are given saturated colours and Polaroid-style borders, dark vignettes, light leaks and lens flare like those that plagued the Kodak moments of previous generations.

[. . . ] Instagram allows a pic to be taken on your smartphone, a digital "filter" to be applied, and the resulting pic made viewable to the site's ever-increasing community. Chances are that that artfully retro pic of a display of cupcakes your friend showed you at the weekend was an Instagram pic.

Launched in March 2010, Instagram took until the end of that year to notch up its millionth user but from there its ascent was dizzying.

Just 15 months later there are more than 30 million account holders and a billion pictures on the site's servers. That's a lot of cupcakes.

Instagram's use of filters mimics some of the processes photographers used to push photographic boundaries - such as the super-saturated colours created cross-processing slides in negative chemicals, or using expired film's palette of soft, muted colours, or playing around with camera settings or darkroom equipment to boost contrast.

The site's co-founder Kevin Systrom has said: "The idea was to make mobile photography fast, beautiful and fun. We learned from experience that taking photos on the phone didn't lead to the results that we wanted, so we created the filters and tools to achieve a more artistic experience."

I've heard Instagram and its kind critiqued for their use of filters, which allegedly replace artistic ability with a tech fix, before--I commented on one such article last month. I noted in 2010 that the mass success of amateur photography has been doing terrible things to the economics of professional photography, but I'm not convinced it's doing artistic damage. As I argued last week, the choice isn't between lots of people taking photographs with Instagram and lots of people taking photos with artistic skills but rather, thanks to inexpensive and easy apps which let people of all skill levels take and share photos, between lots of people taking photographs with Instagram and many fewer people taking photos at all.

Besides, as Dowling notes, Instagram can be used for artistic purposes.

One such convert is Kevin Meredith (aka Lomokev), an author, photographer and teacher based in Brighton.

"I uploaded my first picture to Instagram on 12 October 2010. It was of some sausages frying in a pan - awe-inspiring stuff," he says.

"I do use Instagram differently to how I use film or DSLRs. Instagram images can be all about the immediacy of the moment when I want to let people know what I am up to. I generally send my Instagram pictures to Twitter and Facebook. I keep my Flickr stream for 'real' pictures that I shoot with film and digitally."

Meredith also believes Instagram can be a genuinely creative tool as well.

"It is creative. After all an Instagram image that someone takes even before a filter is added is unique, no-one has ever taken that picture before even if there have been very similar ones taken before it.

"If two people use the same camera, film and lab to develop pictures, their images might visually look the same but that does not stop them putting their own style into the images."

It's important not to overlook the social networking abilities of Instagram, as described at Slate today notes. Instagram's ability to create social networks based on photos is appealing. drood's post "Welcome, New Instagram Users!" highlights just this feature.