I doubt I’m the only person who has recently found their Instagram feed flooded by pictures taken on digital cameras. Low resolution, blurry shots of red-eyed smiling faces, more often than not at night time.
It seems, at first glance, a strange phenomenon. Nowadays, even the most basic of mobile phones has pretty good camera quality. In fact, technology has improved to the extent that award-winning filmmakers, from Sean Baker to Steven Soderbergh, have shot feature films on phones. When looking through old photo albums, parents and grandparents often lament that the quality of pictures was not what it is now. Why, then, has the digital camera market been steadily increasing, particularly among younger generations? It would seem that high photographic resolution has lost some of its charm.
Some readers will already be rolling their eyes. Many would argue that, the same way retro has become more appealing in sectors such as fashion, filmmaking and gaming, the return of the digital camera reflects nothing more than a romantic attraction to things past – which is not even unique to our own era. In part I agree with this assessment, but I also think it’s more complex and interesting than that.
Upon first encountering this phenomenon, I was immediately reminded of Susan Sontag’s brilliant essay ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’. The text focuses on war photography as an art form – an entirely different topic to the one at hand – and yet one point that Sontag makes struck me as particularly relevant. She argues that we have come to associate war photography with a certain candidness: uncontrived, spontaneous shots that do not look like they have been pre-arranged or posed for (unlike what we expect from, say, a portrait). If a spontaneous shot looks too clean, we are quick to reject it as posed and dismiss it having been taken ‘in the moment’. Obviously, in the case of war photography, and as Sontag argues, this is related to the ethics of photographing and viewing the pain of others. However, I still think it’s a useful idea to consider alongside the phenomenon of digital cameras.
We have increasingly become disillusioned with social media and with the overly curated aspect of the images we find on it. We are now suspicious of images that look too good, and moments that seem too perfect. Perhaps it is then, that in its low resolution, we associate digital camera pictures with something more authentic. They give an air of cool unstudiedness, of pictures in which the lack of detail makes it hard for anyone to seem like they are trying to look good. There is an effortless quality to the pictures that seems to send out the message: I am not here to impress. That makes it seem like the goal is to capture a sense of an existing moment of carefree fun rather than to stage it.
Perhaps there is also something to be said about the spontaneity of it all. With film cameras we are overly conscious of the cost of repeating shots to capture the same image multiple times, but with our phones we can confidently do hundreds of takes of any object without looking back – maybe it is that the digital camera lies somewhere in between. Equipped with quite limited storage space, we are unlikely to take too many shots on it in one go.
I am not trying to say that camera quality has lost all its appeal or that digital camera photos are less staged than any other picture, simply that whatever the reason behind this trend is, it is interesting that there is a tendency towards the unstudied – or at least the appearance of it.
