Cell Phone Cameras: Pedestrianism

[Abishai100]

Everyone seems to be walking around these days with a mobile phone (or cell phone) with a built-in mini-camera in it, perhaps making photography an inviting layman art for the modern consumerism age.

If you travel around Washington D.C. this weekend, you might notice multiple Taco Bells (the popular fast food chain serving Americanized Mexican food) and multiple Mexican food trucks (some parked close to the White House).

Indeed, consumerism culture has created a strange arena for the layman mobile phone carrying photographer ready to take on-the-go snapshots of capitalism-in-motion (i.e., ethnicity eateries in the USA).

This gives the look of mobile phone camera photographs (as they are stored and sent by mobile phone SMS or email) a tone of convenience revelation.

Are these the new polaroids?

 

[Politico]

A Polaroid has better quality lol.

 

[Abishai100]

Traffic Heart Meter

The mobile phone mini-camera should also give layman photographers looking for convenient on-the-go snapshots a moment of pause about the levels of efficiency and fun that modern gadgets offer.

As you're walking down the street one day and taking handy-dandy snapshots of random people passing by for your collage of street fare for Mardi Gras and then sending the photos by SMS to your friends' mobile phones, are you taking a moment to consider how modern age confluence-catalyzed human traffic is creating a new 'vitality grid?'

Someone might artistically joke, "Maybe if we all had mobile phones all along, we would not have ever needed all those tree-cutting labored wooden telephone poles strewn across American roads for home landline phones."

Did photography change the day, or is the day changing photography?

 

[Abishai100]

Point/Counter-Point: Pedestrianism Preacher

Aside from the casual concerns that the mass proliferation of cameras (in cell phones, etc.) is devaluing the art of photography or perhaps over-commercializing it, the wide access to the practice of photography creates a social view of traffic conveniences (i.e., Facebook).

The purpose again of the cell phone camera was to offer car drivers a way to take on-the-scene accident photos for insurance convenience purposes. Now, people use cell phone cameras and upload on their Facebook pages the photos of just about anything they took with them.

There's two ways to look at this trend:

1. the Optimist: "the myriad of flashing cell phone cameras around the world create an auditory electronic show resembling the wondrous activity of glowing fireflies"

2. the Pessimist: "consumerism and capitalism have destroyed the art of photography by making it very very pedestrian"






One Hour Photo (Film)

 

[Treeshepherd]

This video is shot by security cameras. It's in a mall, which is the iconic space of consumerism. It involves a cell phone and a pedestrian.



It's the perfect allegory of a distracted society headed right over a cliff. It involves the irony of security cameras. And finally there is the schadenfreude of the people laughing at the woman. As a pessimist, I laugh right along with them.