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Lomography: the Jackson Pollock of photography

An article in today’s Guardian talks about a lomography workshop in Brighton. If you don’t know, lomography is a photography movement that champions old plastic film cameras, with all their analogue imperfections. The article ends: “Then I get my prints back. Almost every bloody shot is overexposed, fuzzy, and with lots of unintentional camera shake. Even the ducks… I’m told there are lots of smartphone apps that can give you the same effects”. There are. One of my favourite filters in Camera+ is Diana, named after a lomography camera.

Sometimes fuzzy things work well. Some people look for the authenticity of imperfections. But with mobile editing apps you can create that fuzziness to your precise requirements. One of the things I said about Hipstamatic in another blog is that you give up some control over the creative process. Of course, you can still do some post-editing, but you leave the initial image to a large extent up to Hipstamatic chance. With lomography, you have almost no control over how your intial image looks and, unless you want to go through the laborious process of scanning your negs or prints or you have a dark room, you can’t do much with your images afterwards either. I guess it’s a Jackson Pollock approach to photography. You chuck a load of light at a piece of film and hope for the best.

I only go to Boots for my ear drops. Wind the clock back 20 years and imagine going there to have your photos developed. Quite horrendously - especially since I chucked in my office job - the prints end up costing about £1 each (according to this article). And how long?!? One of the great things about mobile photography is that its instantaneousness means you can be creative more often, more quickly. Yes, it’s modern, but, hey, life is short, I want to get to that 10,000-photo mark and start taking good photos before I die.