Why the smartphone camera changed photography forever
When I was shooting film, the problem was the huge expense of processing and printing. With digital, the problem became the crazy amount of time it took to grade, retouch, and print my pictures. I loved shooting for myself, I just couldn’t justify the money, or the post-processing time – or both.
But in 2007, everything changed. The iPhone was launched.
We, the audience, are not responding to the sharpness, the clarity, the minimal chromatic aberration or lack thereof — the technical quality aspects of this imagery. We’re responding to the honesty; to the realism; and to the intimacy of the photographs people are posting on Instagram, Pinterest, Flickr, etc. After all, we’ve never really seen it before. Or at least, not in such abundance.