NOESIS: MOBILE UPLOAD

Unless you truly live off the grid, you probably have a cell phone. Chances are, your cell phone also has a camera. You probably use this camera to document certain aspects of your life. You proceed to upload said photographs to social media sites. That way, everyone in your network knows you definitely ate a burger that was way too big for you to be eating at 2am.

Hopefully, it was delicious.

The concept of personal photographic documentation is no longer foreign; for example, Instagram (a strictly mobile storing and sharing service for photographs), has over 14 million users worldwide. Mobile apps, particularly Facebook and Flickr, make it super easy to upload, tag, and share (even shoot directly to the applications themselves). Our phones have Photoshop now too. You don’t even have to touch your computer to develop a personal aesthetic and attract followers that could very well be fascinated by the life you lead. Via your pocket.

Questions that immediately come up, given these circumstances, are obvious: what does this do to photography as an art form? Is carrying an actual camera a thing of the past? Are we living in a generation where all of our ’20-something’ memories will be filtered green and yellow (à la Instagram)? And, albeit rapidly gaining mainstream popularity, is trading in your retro 1977 Pentax ME for an iPhone 4S (and super tiny prints) the new meaning of being alternative in an overtly photographic landscape?

Lindsay Metivier, curator of the Avairy Gallery in Jamaica Plain, takes some of these questions and brings them into light. iPhotography, in it’s final week at the space, stemmed from Metiver’s teaching lessons at Gann Acadamy:

“Students would ask me if I wished I would have picked a different major in College. They’d say, ‘Now that cell phone cameras are so amazing, anyone can take a photo as good or better than you.’”

Metivier says the main goal of the exhibition was to simply shock viewers; are these really cell phone pictures? Walking through the gallery myself, I found it hard to believe that some of them were in fact taken with a cell phone. With 72 prints in varying sizes, the blend of photographic aesthetics was most significant to me. A photograph of a tractor on a farm looked like it could have been taken by a Rebel SLR. On the other hand, more lo-fi approaches (one artist took his iPhone pictures, blew them up, and took screen shots) were also featured. If anything, this mix of style reinforced the fact that taking photos on a cell phone can in fact be artistic in practice.

If your smart phone really is your tiny portal to the rest of the digital world, why not allow it to showcase your personal identity?

“It was fascinating, for me, to see experienced MFA photographers in the same show as people who don’t identify themselves as photographers, or artists.”
Mobile Art seems accessible.

With a print shop open and ready for use in the gallery, Aviary will continue to promote photographic pursuits. Many of the artists featured in the exhibition printed and framed their pieces at the space itself. Aviary hopes to program printing and framing lessons geared towards new photographers this spring.

iPhotography features work by 30 mobile snappers, with a total of 72 framed prints. The exhibition is on view through January 29th. Next month, Aviary will be hosting new paintings by artist Jason Sanford. Exhibition photographs courtesy of Lindsay Metivier.