Starting August 18th, the LA Mobile Arts Festival showed the professional side of what camera-phones can do. Run by the founders of iPhoneArt.com, this week-long gallery in Santa Monica featured 160 iPhone and iPad artists presenting a range of digital photography and other digital art including digital paintings. This is the biggest mobile photographer art show to date, ever. The focus was very specific, so other digital arts like photo scanning and even photos on other mobile brands were absent. And by the time the exhibit closed on the 25th, it had earned some hearty appreciation.
Fully one-third of the iPhone artists are professionals, and the rest have more to offer than the much-maligned Instagram food photo. Co-founder Daria Polichett said when “people think iPhone art or something iPhoneography they think of Instagram now… this is just a chance to show people that there’s a lot more really creative work going on and much more than they might expect that’s possible to do with these devices. ”
In other words, your iPhone and iPad are good for some incredible photos and pieces of art. Much of the art did involve the heavy processing and layers that mobile photographers tend to be quite fond of. So the framed prints ranged from crazy color-saturation to nearly complete abstraction. Whether the original subject was a flower, a person, or a building, the multitude of apps and processes produced some visually stunning objects, which the gallery curators had printed on a range of medium from bamboo panels and mirrors, to cars and a bay window.
According to many of the budding artists proud of their digital photography at the showing, the ability to point their device at anything and snap away, then filter the shots as necessary was profoundly liberating. It was this freedom and the ability to learn on the fly, with minimal financial or extra time investment, that got them into the art form and inspired the passion that ultimately led to the shots featured in the gallery.
Even pros have enjoyed the freedom of shedding pounds of photographic equipment with minimal sacrifice. Artists features at the Mobile Arts Festival who had been shooting professional photos for years described the ability to take 100 or 200 shots a day without carrying any extra equipment around. It allowed them to turn their entire life into a photo shoot.
The art show is the founders’ direct response to the mobile digital photography phenomenon. They wanted to give these “iPhonographers” a space to display their amazing art, and to give patrons a chance to observe a concentration of this quality that may be difficult to find online, amid the less-refined shots people love to share on sites like Facebook.
And while the LA Mobile Photography Arts Festival may be one of the first signs that iPhone cameras are gaining wider traction, the movement shows no signs of slowing. When everyone has access to digital photography on their phones and tablets at all times, an outpouring of high quality amateur photography makes perfect sense. And with this festival, it has a platform to be presented to the public.
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