My iPhone is very useful for work, especially with (the excellent) Evernote and Office installed. It has become my mobile workspace. More freedom to move around, less time tied to a desk and the fantastic syncing of contacts, calendars and documents wherever I go.

Me and everyone else. Nothing new there and another smartphone would probably do the job just as well.

I have a tumblr blog, too.

Both the iPhone and the blog are sources of, to say the least, ambivalence, especially when they work together.

Like everyone else, I am seduced by just how easy (and convenient) it is to take pictures with my iPhone. The best camera is the one you have with you, blah, blah…

The ease of implementation of a tumblr blog is seductive too.

Originally, I set mine up because I wanted an online space that would function as a kind of scrapbook, free from any obligation to keep the content coherent (my main website is, in theory, for that).
It was intended to be somewhere to experiment and have fun, to share disparate elements.

For the tumblr blog there was another reason too: to keep up with what could be done with micro-blogging platforms and to function as a prototype to show (especially NGO) clients when I tell them (as I do repeatedly, without much success) that they should set up micro-sites for specific documentary and aid projects. Get them online quickly and kill or archive them when the project or crisis is over.

Most of what I post to my tumblr blog comes from my iPhone’s camera. I try not to give the process too much thought. As soon as I find myself thinking excessively about what I’m doing or spending too long reworking images on the iPhone, I feel I might as well make a “real” picture with a “serious” camera. The idea, when using the iPhone, is to maintain some degree of speed and spontaneity, otherwise there’s no point.

I use various photographic applications on the phone: Photoshop mobile, LoMob, Hipstamatic, Autostitch, Pano, Truesight. Of them all, Truesight is the most useful because it lets me optimize the dynamic range of the phone’s photographs. I can’t find an easy link to it; you’ll have to search the App Store… Pano produces impressive results and makes good use of the great depth of field that comes from the camera’s small sensor.

Sounds great so far; what’s there to be ambivalent about?
(Here I have to acknowledge – and if you have followed the link to my tumblr blog you will already have seen – that I’m as guilty of all I criticize as anybody else. I make no claim to the high ground here, unfortunately).

Almost all the iPhone photography images and apps I see are backward looking. Their styles replicate old analogue effects: cross-processing, messy borders that look like darkroom-printed polaroids, the rectangular frame of the SX70 cardboard mount… Lo-Mob and Hipstamatic are quite upfront about this, naming their styles after the retro effect they are supposed to mimic. Regularly we see published examples of work made using these processes; snaps of solders in Afghanistan made by an embedded reporter using the iPhone and a pseudo polaroid app; numerous “iPhoneographers” are making reputations with them.

But what, I wonder, is the point in trying to breath life into the corpse of a dead style with new technology? It reminds me of articles I used to see in magazines for “enthusiast” photographers on how to get the “(insert photographer’s name here) look”. At least trying to replicate another photographer’s style in the days of film and manual cameras might have had the spin-off result of increasing the copier’s basic understanding of the processes involved. On the iPhone it’s just a question of pressing a few buttons in the right order. That’s my problem with all this: why get excited about how easy it has become to be unoriginal? Why, I wonder, with all this incredible technology – both for recording and publishing – at our fingertips, do we see so little that is original, new or that actually exploits what could be a brand new medium to the full of its potential?

The answer, at least from one angle is, of course, that there’s a market for these apps and that they satisfy an (unambitious) demand.

The iPhone can record stills, sound, video (you can even edit video on the device) and then almost seamlessly transmit the content to any number of virtually free distribution platforms that can be seen instantaneously world-wide.
Just think of the number of hurdles, logistical, technical and financial, you would have had to jump only fifteen years ago to get one analogue photo made in, say, Afghanistan, into print in a US weekly magazine. What we have at our disposal now is truly incredible so where are the pioneers? Why are we piddling around making our pictures look like something out of (at best) a mid-nineties fashion magazine? Where are the intimate, challenging, independent, multimedia, reactive, documentary projects we could (should?) be seeing?

Let’s make no mistake: the future of reporting and documentation belongs to increasingly small hybrid devices. Photography will be only one of their functions and from what I’ve seen people who currently identify themselves as “photographers” are not doing anything particularly exciting with what is the emblematic precursor of this development.

Which is why, almost every time I post another image to my tumblr blog, I’m filled with the simultaneous desire to wind it up rather than add one more image to the world-wide tricked-up iPhone picture glut. That’s what I call ambivalence. Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you that…

If, when you read this, the link to the blog is dead, you’ll know I’ll have made my decision, and why.