They seem to have taken over Berlin. First it was Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain and Neuköln, now you can’t go anywhere without seeing wooly granddad jumpers, beards and fixie bikes; turn to the online world and it’s all captured on Instagram as it happens.
Scoff if you want, but I think it might just be a sign of something very positive to come; a move away from the fake perfection that Photoshop and the digital age brought along.
In the last decade, as digital cameras and editing software became better, commercial photography acquired a certain flat, almost plastic-like quality. Everything became smooth and perfect, so clean that it’s almost supernatural.
Instagram, on the other hand, celebrates imperfection and the ways of the old days; vintage filters can recreate all kinds of old-school looks from grainy film to toy camera soft focus, while lens flare and vignetting adds an element of ‘happy accident’ to everyday depictions of life shared on social media.
Some people argue that adding a filter to your work isn’t art, and that’s a discussion for another day, but collectively the Instagram movement, the daguerreotype-era beards and the jumpers that were cool in the 1980s are signalling an appreciation of the genuine that we’ve been missing in some genres of photography for a while.
Now that we can make everything look perfect, we’ve become bored and have started to remember the beauty of the old ways.
Hopefully, that will pave the way for some much more interesting photography at all levels, and the hipsters have helped that happen.
So put on an old record, load your toy camera with film and embrace the old ways – ironic attitude is optional.
The post Hipsters are doing photographers a favour appeared first on PhotoVenture.