It was 2011, which feels like a lifetime ago, when I first decided to take smartphone photography seriously. Like many photographers, I didn’t consider the iPhone as a tool for “real” work. Entering this world was characterized by playing with new apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic and their funky novelty filters, working in a square format (Instagram’s only option at the time) and realizing that this new platform was beginning to take over my world of visual storytelling. In fact, this new movement of smartphone photography was solidifying the photographic image as the lingua franca of the global community, from personal to public sharing through images made on this relatively new, pocket-sized device. And with the proliferation of social media apps and channels of communication, the smartphone became the perfect tool for creating imagery for these new mediums.
This series was created during one day at the Ulster County Fair in upstate New York, while I was teaching a photographic workshop for the Center for Photography at Woodstock. I brought my students to this nearby event anticipating a wide range of people and activities that we would encounter; a perfect theatre to produce work.
I chose a somewhat aggressive approach, shooting loosely, paradoxically working on the sly and up close. Taking advantage of the incognito quality of photographing with a smartphone, I was taken less seriously than I would have with a full frame digital camera. This was a stretch for my style of working, but I chose to experiment with my approach on this day.
I sought candid moments as well as camera awareness amongst a diverse range of race, age, and bodies. While a county fair is heralded as a place of great joy, I was attracted to the stress and fatigue of the people I encountered on that summer day.
It is always important to look at our work, examine our intentions and consider how they align with the realities we witnessed. In this case, whether it was a reflection of my mood or I was actually capturing the atmosphere, I’m not certain. But that’s one of the magical qualities of photography; the ambiguity and the inverse relation of my internal mood to the external energy.
The use of extreme filters evidenced in this body of work is long gone. I now prefer to capture my images as plainly as possible, using my abilities to see, observe, capture light, color, compositions, to make strong and timeless images.
This work is a throwback to the beginnings of the current moment we’re living through, where photography has become digital, a product of coding and pixels, a medium that lives in electrical currents, not film, paper and the material world. Regardless, the cavalcade of characters that I captured live on in my consciousness and remind me of that day where the digital and physical world collided in a chorus of warmly tinted shades.
