Matthew Robertson MA Photography RPT

1. Matthew RobertsonMA Photography RPT Module 1 Assessment iPhoneography and the Photographic Network

2. Brief Description • “The swift pace at which we create images is only matched by the pace at which we discard them and yet, paradoxically, we’ve never been more engaged with images. Photography is less about document or evidence and more about community and experience …” Stephen Mayes. • The main focus investigates the rise in Smartphone photography and the interaction with photographic imagery on Social Media platforms. It seeks to discover whether mobile phone photography is a relevant means of professional practice and ask questions such as: • Where does this photography sit in terms of contemporary creative practice? • Is it a relevant means of photographic exploration? • Is it possible to build an engaging body of work using a mobile phone? • How is a photographs relevance and meaning changed through this means of capture?

3. Motivation & Outcomes • The iPhone has become my most used camera. • As a technician, new technologies and techniques are central to my creative practice. • It’s a new language that I want to explore. The Smartphone is a multimedia tool which is always evolving and shifting. • It’s a fluid form of image making. Photographs are shot, edited and published through the one device. • It allows a freedom of exploration unlike other forms of image making. • To develop my creative practice and develop researching skills. • To broaden my career opportunities in teaching. • To collaborate with other artists and photographers.

4. Initial Research • Current practitioners using Smartphones: • Stephen Mayes • Ed Kashi • Richard Koci Hernandez • Matt Eich • Kathy Ryan • Damon Winter • Karen Divine • People writing about Mobile Photography: • Photographs Are No Longer Things, They’re Experiences.Stephen Mayes. • After Photography.Fred Ritchin. • iPhones and the Emerging Fifth Moment of Photography. Edgar Gomez Cruz & Eric T. Meyer. • From Memory to Experience: The Smartphone, A Digital Bridge. Stephen Mayes.

5. Main Findings • There seems to be a definite shift in the way we consume images- Facebook, Flickr, Instagram. These apps create trends, build followings and create aesthetics particular to their brand. • The language of photography is changing. Words are used like- fluid, shared, experience, shifting, evolving, context. They are used in context of what came before- memory, document, history, fixing, analogue. • Ritchin describes it as Quantum imagery vs. Newtonian imagery. The latter always has a “cause and effect” while the former exists quite often without context or location. However, he argues by introducing the “personal and intimate”, and using the forms of photo essays the digital can be given an “exploratory and historical context”. Furthermore it can thrive through a means of collaboration in online multi media forms. • The Smartphone allows a photographer a more intimate view in to the world by allowing him/her to get closer to their subject. Damon Winter talked about this in “A Grunt’s Life”. • The idea of shared experiences and giving the Smartphone image context, led me to two ideas. Home and Countryside.

11. Global Week • An experimental installation in self-portraiture using an iPhone and WIFI printer. • This was part of a larger exhibit by MA students for NTU’s Global Week celebrations. • The purpose was to represent the diversity in cultures we have here at NTU and in Nottingham as part of NTU’s Global Week, whilst allowing people to share in creating physical connections through the images and string helping to build a tactile representation of social media. • Initial design.SideluckPotshow’s Irving Penn booth and Nottingham Contemporary’s Diane Arbus photo booth. • This would exist online only on an Instagram page. • A lot of the projects I researched were using DSLR’s and complex programming to take and edit the images e.g. Arbus booth and ‘The Portrait Machine’. • I wanted this to be instant, simple, like a user experiences using their Smartphone.

13. Global Week Re-think • The technology wouldn’t work as simply as needed. • Discovered ‘The Portrait Machine’. An installation in Amsterdam that uses software programming to select portraits taken in the exhibit and choose three based on similarities in clothing, hair, poses and display them across three screens. • The idea was to connect visitors to each other based on our similarities and differences enabling a shared experience. • This prompted a change in my initial idea. • Using printed images which the audience would curate to create a shared experience based on the model of social media. • The idea was to isolate these images in print, in the installation and encourage people to interact with them to move away from the mass volume of online imagery one would potentially experience on social media sites.

15. Global Week Results • Everyone engaged with the installation, putting thought in to what they had written on the photographs and where they hung them. • A lot of people took more than one image, scrolling through to select one before printing. There was an editing process taking place. • The Smartphone had changed purpose. On a tripod within an exhibit it became something larger than the phone in a pocket. People treated it with uncertainty at first. • Nature of the space. ‘On the spot’ vs. ‘on the run’.

16. MA Interim Exhibit

17. London Underground • Initial influence came from the shot of Euston Road (left image) on my way back from The London Art Fair. • The composition was already there as all the elements fitted nicely in to the frame of the iPhone camera. • It’s simple and abstract, but it’s one small piece amongst the stress and heat of the underground. This is actually an image of roughly a two/three second window as people passed by the lens in the busy underground.

18. Earl’s Court • This image was taken a month later. • I found a way to shoot the London Underground but this time I was aware of what I was looking for. • Each station is so different in colour, shape, texture leaving a lot to experiment with. • The iPhone relieves the burden of heavy kit. Routines of exposure and composition are lessened and the editing is almost immediate. I can concern myself more with the ‘why’ than the ‘how’ when I’m shooting. • Using the iPhone creates a consistent output with the subject matter I’ve chosen. Once the elements of the scene fit in to the screen, the touch screen is pressed and the photo taken. • I can shoot, edit and publish straight from the station and move on.

19. Happenchance • The idea of a diptych was purely accidental. The word ‘happenchance’ was used a lot during its exhibition. • I had sent the images through to be printed out on satin paper to the curator of the exhibit. However, these were two A3 images being printed on to an A2 sheet and the printer malfunctioned and didn’t cut the two images apart. • I looked at it and decided it worked well as a diptych. They both complimented and contrasted each other and if I separated them, I felt they would have lost the sense of humour that the diptych gave to each image. • They became more intriguing by being together than apart. • I’m playing with the idea of stitching a large number together on the phone, throughout one journey through several stations in one day.

20. Feedback • The feedback from the group seemed positive overall. • Quite a few people would have liked to have seen them bigger. • One person mentioned the images reminded them of Mark Rothko’s paintings, a lot of which were very large in scale, perhaps around A1/A0 size as a comparison. I had gone with A3 because I was concerned how large I could print an iPhone image before it began to disintegrate in quality. • Also, the scale of the image matched the scale of the camera I had used. The phone is a pocket-sized tool. I went for smaller scale prints. • However, having been to a Rothko exhibit, when you sit on a gallery bench with his large canvases in front of you they do draw you in. Perhaps these images would work on a much larger scale. I’ll experiment with the prints to see how large I can get a phone image.

21. Plan for New York • Both Kathy Ryan (Director of Photography The New York Times) and Stephen Mayes (Director of Photo VII Agency) have agreed to meet for an informal conversation regarding iPhoneography and photography in the current technological climate. • I need to finalise a set of questions to steer the conversation which I will email to them in the next couple of weeks. • Why are professional photographers using their Smartphones to capture stories? • What is the driving force behind Smartphone photography? Is it economics, aesthetics? • There’s a currency in that “we are the reporters”. Boston, Japan, Syria. Is there a currency of power within that? • Ask Kathy why she does her black and white abstract shots on her phone? What’s the purpose behind them. • Where is the gain for a professional doing photography through Instagram and Flickr? Without a direct financial benefit for the professional, what is the purpose? • Experiment with Street Photography while in the States. Is there content to capture on the subway system that goes with the underground images in London? • Consider portraits of the people you meet over there, sharing that experience asking them to do the same of you?