Photographic polemics using a smartphone
In 2012, I owned a Samsung Galaxy S Plus (i9001). The camera on this smartphone was very mediocre and, at the time, hopelessly inferior to any basic digital camera.
And yet, taking photos with a smartphone was by no means uninteresting at that time. After all, a smartphone isn’t just a phone and a camera, but first and foremost a fully-fledged computer. As a result, even back in 2012, camera applications (apps) were available that gave photos a unique character either at the time of capture or through immediate post-processing.
I was interested in apps that gave photos a retro look reminiscent of historic analogue cameras. I experimented with ‘Retro Cam’. The free version of this app – which was, however, limited to 920 x 920 pixels – offered a choice of five built-in ‘cameras’. I was particularly taken with the Pinhole Camera, which the app’s developer himself described as producing results less predictable than Schrödinger’s cat.
The Pinhole Camera simulates shots on film, utilising the perforated area of the film. This results in a square format. The ‘camera’ produces severe vignetting (light fall-off towards the edges) and ‘develops’ into harsh, metallic colours with high contrast. It also adds artificial ageing scratches and mould spots to the ‘film’ (so many quotation marks!) via software.
All this is just a bit of fun to pass the time, and really, one ought to have better things to do. On the other hand, one can of course try to make conceptual use of this toy’s peculiarities. That’s what I’ve attempted to do.
These days, many neighbourhoods in major German cities are probably a bit odd – not just Hamburg-Lurup, where I used to live. Here there was a aggressively petit-bourgeois, forced idyll, hundred-year-old walker-users and rubbish left behind by chavs in every variation and in every conceivable place. And against all this, building is proceeding at a feverish pace, lending the whole thing even more hustle and bustle, disorder and ugliness. Visually, acoustically and in every other respect, sparing no sense, everything is permeated by the ever-present traffic. A splendid setting, then, for a bit of visual polemic during a long walk in late winter 2012 with my ‘electric’ Retro-Cam pinhole camera...