Camera phone: How camera phones are changing photography

Pictures taken on a camera phone differ from pictures taken with conventional cameras and even older SLRs or the original daguerreotypes.  Camera phone photographs are about spontaneity and instant gratification.  The original cameras often took minutes or hours to make a single photograph: photographs where taken to remember landscapes or to honor the dead.  When photographs took only a few minutes to take, people posing needed to stand perfectly still, or else the final image would be blurry.  If they moved their eyes, their eyes would come out solid white, like zombie eyes, in the resulting print.  But camera phones let the user take a picture quickly and see the results instantly.  Camera phones provide low-stress photography and instant gratification.

Camera phones change photography by making photography omnipresent.  While security cameras have been around for decades, camera phones represent the first time the average citizen has had a way of recording his surroundings constantly with him.  Since the device is a cellular telephone that also acts as a camera, he is more likely to carry the single device than a cell phone plus a bulky camera.  And so the citizen is always ready to record his surroundings.

The immediate and embarrassing downside of this is that the cameras are always there when the photographer and his friends are being silly and drinking, and the temptation to take a photograph and send it to other friends may be too strong to resist at the moment, though strongly regretted in the morning.  The cameras can record every happening at a party.  A photograph is no longer an event that everyone needs to dress up and pose for; photographs are low-resolution and casual and almost disposable, though computer hard drives can save huge numbers of them.  Another downside of camera phones is that some people use them deliberately to invade other people’s privacy by illegally and secretly taking pictures, for example, with the camera aimed up a woman’s skirt on an escalator.  These instances are rare, however, and the click sound the phones usually make when a picture is taken deters this kind of abuse.

The strongest benefit to constantly having a camera is in the reduction or the solving of crimes.  And average citizen can capture the face of a criminal or a license plate, and the photograph is more precise and thus more helpful to police than an eyewitness description or a stressed attempt to memorize a license plate number.

So camera phones have made it so that cameras are always around, in the hands of everyday people who use them to take pictures of friends and family, to record unexpected events, and even to document evidence of crimes to turn over to police.  Camera phones represent a trade off in privacy versus surveillance and the ability to record and remember events beyond the human limitations of the brain’s memory.  It will be interesting to see how the trade offs progress as camera phones become more pervasive, less expensive, and more available.  They represent a shift in how people use photography, and we can only hope the good outweighs the bad.