Cellular Imaging

Side work, snippet of a paper i wrote.

"Just like the telephone, Multimedia services allow us to be in contact with another person with out the direct confrontation that talking in person would hold. We are freer to communicate imagery and content through a 3^rd person object resulting with a less censored exchange. People in today’s culture grab onto a cell phone like a cigarette we must always be in constant contact with our phones just in case we need to send a quick text or make an emergency call. Now that all of these portable phones are connected with a camera think of it this way: our vice is now to constantly be in physical contact with a camera or video camera. Think of the impact this could make on our society if millions of people were photojournalists, documenting life around them. In essence, this is what the camera phone is, except it is not limited to middle aged men and women but to all ages and races and status levels. Now that we have the beginning of a huge archive of digital images dating from 2004 onward, what will these images mean to society? Thousands of poor quality records of personal and public events are starting to create a new subculture of a Cell Phone genre. Documentation of high and low society can bring a lot of cultural issues into the face of the public, and to mass amounts of people instantly. "

-"Cellular Imaging", for my Alternative Photography class.

Images provided by: Jade Hackett, Travis Williams, Austin Buckingham, and Steven Lewis.

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Ive been getting some really great PictureMail from people lately, and I'm really grateful for it.

I read in the winter issue of Aperture, about how civilians in the middle east are able to identify terrorist members by images that they capture on their cell phones. As well as certain members of gangs and other organizations have been able to be arrested through cell media. Who needs photo journalists when anyone with a cell phone can document on a whim?

I feel like the way "us kids" operate now we are constantly attached to some kind of electronic device be it ipods, or cells, or laptops ect. we have a constant contact with some kind of network that we can wireless-ly send information. We can take in so much more information through our eyes as well as our devices, that in bulk it creates a fantastic database of current culture. We live in a fast pace society, but we can document it in a fast pace method as well. HOW CrAzY!

i like to think of all these images as some kind of digital view master...


Brandon Frederick

Steve Lewis

Travis Williams

Alicia Foster

picture mail.

You all should send me good picturemail. INSTANT fun.

like my good friend Austin here.


Austin Buckingham

edit


Steve Lewis

thank you Steve.

Oops, i forgot my camera.

Last week a freak snow storm happened. The flakes were pouring down like volcanic ash and floated down like bubbles to the ground, where the immediately evaporated. These snow flakes were about the size of tennis balls. THEY WERE HUGE i'm telling you. About 5 of us were in the photo department at the time, and we all decided that we should definitely document this, but none of us had a camera.

WHICH IS DEPRESSING BY THE WAY.

But anyway, we all whipped out our cell phones and started taking pictures of one another playing in the crazed snow. After i regained feeling in my fingers from the cold, i searched through my phone and started looking at all my images. Then it dawned apon me how i ALWAYS have a camera on me, because i always have my phone.





On my phone i have an extra memory card to hold images or music or whatever, resulting in my phone having a SD capacity of about 8 gb. HOLY MOTHER. that's a lot of room on a tiny 1 megapixel camera.




It turns out that i had about 5 gb worth of pictures on my phone already. And some of these babies were pretty darn interesting. I mean i think i underestimate the full epic range of composition, and formal image quality in some of these tiny pictures. FA REAL. I document with out really knowing pretty much my whole life, Kind of like Helio does. I have metaphorical rolls and rolls of "film" smashed into my camera of poorly exposed photographs that have not been respected like they should have.





So here are some images that i collect and document life everyday. As mundane as they are they hold more baggage then most images i compose with my SLR, and i think that is something to be noted.