iPhones for Artistic Photography
iPhones for Artistic Photography
Accomplished photographers tend to bristle when
asked to talk about the equipment they use. They
often say, “It’s not the camera that makes the
picture — it’s the photographer.” Acclaimed photog-
rapher Richard Koci Hernandez would agree, but
he’s likely to gush about his camera anyway. That’s
because some of the most interesting and satisfying
work of his career has come from his iPhone camera.
The kind of gear that once helped Hernandez
garner Pulitzer Prize nominations now rests idly in a
camera bag.
“I fell in love with [the iPhone camera] so quickly,
I disavowed myself from every professional camera,
boxed them up, and have never gone back,” said
Hernandez, a former San Jose
Mercury News
photo-
journalist who now teaches multimedia journalism at
University of California, Berkeley. “It literally changed
my life.”
His sentiments reveal the disruption that
smartphone cameras, especially the iPhone, have
brought to photography. Although they are often
used to take selfies, iPhones have been the tool of
choice to create significant works for photography
exhibitions, video and stills for major ad campaigns,
and more.
“Social is the key component of this when talking
about mobile photography,” said Jason Farman, asso-
ciate professor of American Studies at University of
Maryland, College Park. “The way the iPhone camera
links out to the broader world, they’re not simply pho-
tographs. It’s the expression of identity and how people
craft their social world.” Hernandez is a prime example
of this phenomenon: on Instagram, the photographer
has more than 250,000 followers from around the
world, a much larger and more diverse audience than
the newspaper readership he used to serve.
Hernandez remembers being on breaking news
assignments with editors breathing down his neck to
file his pictures on deadline, which meant
now
. It was
a major advance when photographers could shoot
digital images and transmit them from a laptop.
But shooting with his iPhone was quicker still, and
Hernandez found himself sending pictures he took
with his phone to satisfy editors looking to update
the newspaper’s website.
Although early iPhone cameras could not pro-
duce images of the same high quality as those taken
with film or DSLR cameras, Hernandez saw the poten-
tial. “It’s not only a creative tool, because the phone
is tied to the internet. Now you have a distribution
platform,” Hernandez said. “It was a darkroom in my
hand, and it became a way to distribute. Photography
had never seen that before. Now I could do all these
things in the palm of my hand with apps that used to
take me hours in the darkroom and years and years
of training.”
His street photographs, shot mostly in black
and white, feature striking light, sharp shadows, and
bold compositions while preserving a human element.
He admits to being drawn to silhouetted figures,
especially when there is a structured hat involved, but
nothing about his work seems derivative. The result is
a body of work that is dreamy and at times haunting —
and uniquely his.
His work caught the eye of Pierre Le Govic,
whose French publishing house, Out of the Phone, is
devoted exclusively to publishing mobile photography
works. One of the first books published by Out of
the Phone was Hernandez’s 2014
Downtown
, which
includes 84 photographs.
That same year, Hernandez deleted his photos
from Instagram out of a desire to start fresh. After
a brief break, his shadowy street scenes returned.
He is energized by the often immediate feedback he
receives from followers.
That kind of instant connection was almost
nonexistent when working for a newspaper “because
it was an arduous process for someone to take the
time to actually write a letter, and finding my work
was always hard,” he recalled. “In 20 years, I got
about 12 letters and maybe two dozen emails. So
for me, there is really no comparison to the imme-
diate feedback loop that social media created for
responses to my work.”
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