Societal Standards in a Social Media World
For my first blog post I want to speak to aestheticism, especially how it has shaped society and how I perceive photography at times, additionally how it manifests in my art. Now in a time where social media is so prevalent in how one identifies and individualizes amongst the many “ Accounts”.
Note: I will be using quotation marks for this post as a means to differentiate between “ Filters” instantly applied to through smartphone technology and filters, the individual lenses one can apply to one’s camera, and “Millennial terminology”.
This revolution in cell phones has altered immensely since the 1990’s with the invention of the smartphone; where everything was instantaneous. I would consider this period of time, and up until now, instant gratification. I went from the owner of an Orange Verizon Envy, to a Blackberry Bold 9000 and then the trifecta, the iPhone 2. Each device died with stories attached and millions of images stored for a later day. My personal favorite was my iPhone 5, it got me through the last year of high school and sophomore year of Dean College. When I switched phones that school year, my friend Lauren had a hockey stick and purposed we shamed it up to relieve stress.
What was left of that iPhone 5 was a reminder of how much smart phones had become another limb of our human. By having so many access in one hand, elements of the past was lost, though the camera industry was thriving exceedingly with the digital age, in my opinion, film might have started to become less of a mode to capture images and more as an aesthetic. One might argue differently, and I will agree now film has become easier to capture one’s natural beauty in modeling selections; that is a point that I will get to eventually.
Digital is greatly consumed in our time with all devices we own as one human or household. Growing up all my baby photos were captured on a Nikon point-and-shoot film camera. Each image snapped went through the printing process and was printed twice. One for the album, and one for the boxes. In middle school, we had an album of CD-ROMs of all the photos we had taken over the years on our digital camera. The internet content at this time correlated highly with people editing and distorting images that were originally shot either DSLR or Digital.
There became different layers to taking/editing photos in this age of digital with the instant gratification of having “Apps” immediately altering the image in the moment you snap it. Applications like VSCO, Huji, and other instantaneous filtered image “platforms” give the already desired aesthetic. The more I scroll through my instagram feed I am always tallying up the images where clearly it was taken on a smartphone and edited to look like film photography, or actual film photos that can be scanned for the ability to share online.
With instant gratification, simplistically has been lost between capturing moments. Selfies are more common, group photos are a hassle, and Christmas card photos are sent online than through the mail. Recently I received in the mail from a high school friend, tangible photos of us throughout the years. It made me happy and I taped them to my wall of photography to admire.
Society Standards change, how people consume the world is different, and how we photograph now is revolutionary, but deceitful. Film photography has shaped and inspired, and is continuously used by the modeling industry to rightfully capture the beauty of a human. Even if you took the photo on your smartphone, applied “ Grain” on the VSCO app, you are feeding into the achieved aesthetic that is film photography. Let’s say you go out of your way to get a simple 35mm camera to buy into the hype, you are taking away the instant gratification process, which actually gives you a moment to wonder,
“ Just how much time and money will I have to add just to see these images?”
That is where consumption of money and societal status come into order and there is a reckoning within the smart age of photography. You can “ follow “ people on Instagram, VSCO, Tumblr and all other social media platforms where you see this aesthetic achievement unfold into what an individual wants to portray within this online world.
You can take the person off the internet. You can remove the smartphones and online accounts, and hand them a camera. Film or not, what are they going to tell the world through their images? What aesthetic would they try to achieve? If anything, how would this change in capturing images alter there views of individualism?
