Overview
Before Instagram there was Hipstamatic - an app for your iPhone that transformed your boring and ordinary 21st century photos into dreamy capsules from a bygone yesteryear with vignetting, light leaks and nostalgically ethereal shades and tints. Hipstamatic promised the 'look, feel, unpredictable beauty and fun of plastic toy cameras from the past' and now, in a bid to regain their popularity and get one up on Instagram, Hipstamatic is offering a new dimension to their faux-analogue photography experience: a digital disposable camera. No, they're not encouraging you to throw your iPhone in the bin each time you've shot a roll of 'film', but what they are doing - cheeky buggers - is hiding your photos from you until you have taken 24 shots.
The intention behind the app is questionable. Does this really provide you with a new avenue to experience the fun and anticipation of when you were 12 and brought a chunky yellow Kodak for your geography excursion, when you were so enthralled by this novel device and so enamoured by the gentle clicking sound as you wound back the wheel, that when you finally picked up your prints you realised that half of your photos were pure white flash and the other half were of lizards tails and your friends' noses? Or is using Hipstamatic and the like really an analogous experience akin to that of playing around with a Holga or Diana?
I remember the first time I discovered the world of toy cameras, and my heart exploded. One year and at least a dozen rolls of film later, I still have no idea how to use my little 135mm Holga, nor my Polaroid 300, nor my (nominally oxymoronic) reusable disposable. However, in my vain and valiant attempts to try, I have discovered new techniques, unearthed the aesthetic magnificence of accident, and had a hell of a lot of fun too.
Hipstamatic could be seen to be taking the whole 'new-technology-that-looks-like-old-technology-but-without-the-inconveniences' mode too far, and in doing so it begs the question: does snapping away with your ol' Hipstamatic - changing lens, flash and film with the effortless swipe of a finger - have something to offer, something to genuinely fill that yearning in all of our hearts for our sun-drenched, sepia-toned childhoods? Or is it a facade wrapped in authenticity wrapped in a marketing facade?
The sheer, paradoxical irony of having a 'digital disposable' camera suggests that perhaps in our quest to replicate bygone artifacts and sentiments, too much use has been made of synthetic and spurious techniques and tools for the end product to ever achieve the cultural authenticity that we crave. Perhaps we should concentrate, instead, on embracing the here and now - because, after all, in five or ten years we may well find ourselves looking back on our iPhones and our DSLRs while we shake our heads in nostalgia, ruing those days of focused, instant and digital photography.
Either way, Hipstamatic's digital disposable is yours for only $1.99. Now, that is like the good old days.
