By Jessica Saia
Most people who drive on the freeway or take public transit have seen those “Shot on an iPhone 6” billboards. A recent trip to Mexico had nothing on the perplexed bonding my friends and I experienced scoffing hardcore at the ads on the subsequent drive home from SFO. Because, first, I personally hate when billboards use one, matter-of-fact, haughty quip of a sentence to advertise something. Secondly, what does that tagline even mean? The photos are nice, but are we supposed to be that impressed with a shot of pine trees in the snow? Or is it the feat that they were able to be blown up to billboard size? We figured the intent is for anyone to look up and think “Gee, I could be a photographer, too, if I just had an iPhone 6 and a clean baby head to pile some blankets on top of.”
I asked our resident photographer, Sierra Hartman, about the campaign, and he pointed out that while the camera on the iPhone is certainly quality for a phone-camera (still, the technology is at best comparable to the first DSLRs that came out over a decade ago), all the photos they chose to feature are shot in even light, meaning that there aren’t any real bright highlights or dark shadows; an ideal habitat for phone cameras which typically have a relatively narrow dynamic range. Which, whatever. I’m grateful to have any camera on my luxurious phone to take horrible photos with, and so I wouldn’t give a second thought to any of this if they weren’t arrogantly INSISTING that the featured shots were billboard-quality.
This is all just to say that I thoroughly appreciate the Tumblr-documented street-art parody Also Shot on iPhone 6, a project by an SF-based duo. They blew up photos of bathroom selfies, distorted faces, and other much more ubiquitous subjects when it comes to what the iPhone is most often documenting, framed them in identical borders, and mounted them alongside the original ads:
I emailed the pair to ask about the project. They explained, “The iPhone 6 ads are all over San Francisco and we walk by them every day. All the photos Apple selected for the campaign are beautiful. Our thought was that people don’t always take pretty pictures on their phones, so we thought it would be funny to show the other, non-beautiful, photos people take. We both work as creatives in advertising and love to make fun of our industry whenever we can. We put them up this past Sunday, mostly around the Mission, Castro, and downtown area where all the iPhone 6 ads are.”
Bra. Vo. Guys.
