Joshua Sarinana

“Regardless of what it signifies, any photographic image also connotes memory and nostalgia, nostalgia for modernity and the twentieth century, the era of the pre-digital, pre-post-modern.” --Lev Manovich

There will always be a need to connect to the past. Contemporary culture actively and unconsciously cycles through past follies and reflects upon progress. It is no surprise then, that we see popular culture re-presenting past generations. Perhaps more so than any other period in our recent past, today’s pop-cultural climate is mimicking that of the 1970s.

Photography is powerful because we can place ourselves into the perspective of those we see in an image. Whether it’s street photography, photojournalism or portraiture, we use photography to understand ourselves in relation to people around us.

“we still look relentlessly to technology for solutions to the very problems technology seems to cause [...]” – David Foster Wallace

Over the past few years, iPhoneography has created a new form of photography that has and will continue to re-structure how we interface with technology, gather and generate data, and how we create narratives. iPhone (and similar smartphone) users employ mobile photography to disseminate mass amounts of information, to subvert cultural institutions, and for political rallying. These behaviors parallel the same strategies of the radical Avant-Garde art movements of the 20th century.

In the third and final article in this series I will expose the hidden contradiction that exist between mobile photography and the Avant-Garde described in Wallace’s quote through the use of Collage.

“The avant-garde of 1967 repeats the deeds and gestures of those in 1917. We are experiencing the end of …

Over a half a billion Apple iOS and Android systems have been sold, which means that there are now an unprecedented number of cameras in the world. This monumental increase in smartphone cameras has allowed for the dramatic increase of photos uploaded to social media sites.

I’m often overwhelmed by the fact that I can upload photos to Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Flickr, 500px, VSCOcam, Artflakes, Snapchat, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, EyeEM, and on, and on, and on. Through such apps, a half billion photos are uploaded to the Internet each day. The sheer scale and accelerated growth of mobile photography and social media integration, which I’ll call the new photography, has quickly changed photography in just a few short years.

Data is embedded in our environment, in our behavior, and in our genes. Over the past two years, the world has generated 90% of all the data we have today. The information has always been there, but now we can extract and collect massive amounts of it.

Given the explosion of mobile photography, social media based photo sharing, and video streaming, it’s likely that a large portion of the data we collect and create comes in the form of digital images.

As a photographer, you will sooner or later bump into the phrase "the decisive moment". The decisive moment is a concept made popular by the street photographer, photojournalist, and Magnum co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson. The decisive moment refers to capturing an event that is ephemeral and spontaneous, where the image represents the essence of the event itself.

People will do just about anything to alleviate their anxiety. During the last year of writing my doctoral thesis, the worry about being able to finish grew increasingly heavy. The relentless grind of research, constantly being told that your work is inadequate, and believing that 80-hour workweeks are average has its tolls on all students. Once you reach the edge of this process and are pulverized into oblivion, you get a nice, shiny PhD.

You may be wondering what got me through this. The answer? Buying a ton of camera equipment. To photographers, this type of retail therapy is known as gear acquisition syndrome. Someone with this syndrome impulsively buys cameras and related gear, amassing more camera gear than they can realistically use.

Photo manipulation is nearly as old, if not as old, as photography itself. It has been used in state propaganda, to unify nations, for aesthetic and creative expression, to generate fear, and the list goes on and on.

As technology advances, altering photographic images has become quite easy. This begs the question: do the images we see convey accurate information?

There has been a good deal written about the similarities of the camera to the eye as well as the computer to human memory. What I would like to do is clarify the uniqueness of the human brain from camera technology and at the same time show the similarities between brain function, photography and cognition.