Stockland Martel

.

From Jeremy Edwards' "From the Pocket" iPhoneography project.

.

A lot of photographers really love their iPhone camera. Like, really love it. And I’m not sure why. There’s no flash, you’ve got to stay stone still to get a clear picture, you can’t zoom, and the camera’s technical limitations don’t even produce interesting visual quirks, the way a Holga does, for example. And I am not the only one puzzled by this camera’s popularity.

“…What is it that has made people so excited about the iPhone as a camera?” Marc Feustel, a Paris-based curator and writer, asks in a post this week at his blog, eyecurious. (In that post, he also makes note of Joel Sternfeld’s plans to publish a book of photos of Dubai that he took with an iPhone.) “Is it the iPhone applications that allow you to edit photographs on your phone directly instead of having to upload them to a computer first?

.

An iPhone fitted with an SLR lens. (Photo courtesy of eyecurious.com.)

.

“While I think that apps are really one of the greatest innovations about the iPhone,” Feustel continues, “I don’t see how this brings much to the table in terms of photography. Sure there are now lots of applications that are essentially extremely basic versions of Photoshop, allowing you to make a photograph look like a Polaroid or apply a virtual selenium toner, but I don’t see the advantage of being able to do this instantly instead of waiting a few hours and doing it on a computer with better quality photo-editing software.  iPhoneography strikes me as more of a brand name than a distinct photographic practice.”

Feustel’s post was inspired by Chicago photographer Jeremy Edwards, whose project “From the Pocket” comprises what Edwards calls “iPhoneography.” As he explains at his tumblr page, “All of the images featured on this site were captured using iPhone cameras. Images were processed using various iPhone photography applications only.”

.

From Jeremy Edwards' "From the Pocket" iPhoneography project.

.

The images—with all due respect to Edwards—are not so much the point as the technology. The iPhone camera becomes his marketing concept to get his images written about (as Feustel did and as I’m doing now) and even purchased. Edwards is selling prints and cards through his tumblr account by way of Fotomoto, and he notes that he’s planning a print-on-demand book of his iPhoneography photos this spring.

The fact that he’s pushing them as iPhone pictures also makes these images super accessible—you don’t have to know anything about art or photography or even have much of an opinion about the images themselves to comfortably have them in your home. It’s sufficient to tell your guests that the photos on your wall were taken with a phone camera. “Wow. That is so cool, dude.”

I’m being facetious, but from a marketing perspective, I think Edwards’ project is clever. Whether he can sustain people’s interest with “From the Pocket” over time, though, will depend not on what he’s shooting with but on his creative vision. Yeah, it does always come down to that.

.

.