When Ben Lowy first began shooting with his iPhone in 2010 it was all about having fun, using the iPhone camera instead of his professional camera gear as a way of differentiating photography as work and as leisure. Three years on and Lowy has built a huge following on social media and now integrates his iPhone photography with his professional work, the iPhone becoming another tool in his kit.
In the field Lowy said the iPhone is at times useful. “ It is small and innocuous and does help you get a little more intimate with subjects as compared to having a large SLR, so I do call less attention to myself. Or at least I did, but now I think people pretty much know when you are taking a picture of them on the phone”.
Lowy said “the ability to edit, post and caption all within the framework of one piece of technology is very important to me as is social media” and he has a large body of work on Tumblr. Although he now “feels the need to feed the beast daily” he is exploring new ways to use social media.
“There’s no point to keeping all your images in the proverbial shoebox underneath your bed. For much of my career, over the past decade, most of my pictures are ones and zeros, digital files that pretty much most people haven’t seen because they would appear in one place, maybe in a magazine for a week or online for a few hours and that was it. So I’m trying to occupy that digital space in a more effective way and for me right now the way technology and infrastructure is, that’s using social media”.
Asked about his motivation to exhibit at the Head On Photo Festival Lowy said that festivals allow the photojournalist to present a larger body of work. “For photographers it gives us certain closure to be able to finally put together a work that often we’ve risked our lives for. You have certain limitations when you work for a magazine, or newspaper, where sometimes only one or two pictures get shown and that doesn’t really encompass what you witnessed. So it is important to have festivals like this so we can show what we’ve seen in its entirety”.
The conversation turns to art versus documentary photography. Lowy said he doesn’t differentiate between the two. “My art, I would say, is purely finding a different way to talk about the documentary work that I am doing. I don’t really do much beyond documentary work. I find plenty to work with in capturing the serendipity of life. I don’t do other niche sub-genres of photography so for me I experiment with visual, and my art, quote unquote, is sort of my experiment with trying to create an aesthetic connection to the viewer that can lift them past the kind of rote reaction to normal work”.
He continued. “As you said, so many people see so many images on a daily basis and many of those are the same rectangular 35mm shape with the same kind of golden rectangle rule of thirds in composition. How many pictures have we seen of Afghanistan with soldiers walking down a dusty road? Or in Syria with a sniper in a building? Sometimes people get really apathetic because there are so many images out there and they are seeing the same thing day after day after day. How do you get them out of that rote? For me that’s where I experiment with the aesthetic to try and present something new and different in order to attract the eye first and then lead them to the content. When I first started using the phone it was a relatively new thing and no one was really doing it and no one really knew what these images were or what was making them. Now it is not a new thing anymore and it’s sort of lost its touch in that regard”.
Alison Stieven-Taylor
EXHIBITION
iAfghanistan
Until 14 June 2013
State Library of NSW
Macquarie Street, Sydney
Australia
