iPhone Photos as Art

And Videos

Sunset at our Southeast Florida Beach

With Surfer Girls
They assured us the water was quite warm even if the air wasn't.

 *

January 22nd was the day our prolonged cold snap began, the first day we wore long pants and several layers of clothing.*1 That evening my husband and I drove to the beach. While it wasn’t cold compared to those in the rest of the south and on up the east coast, it was only 65 degrees Fahrenheit with a stiff and algid wind out of the east-northeast - it felt darned cold to us.   Joe and I just aren’t used to anything below 75 degrees Fahrenheit in the evening anymore, and yes we are totally spoiled by the southeast Florida weather. Never the less, the beach was bathed in a beautiful warm yellow-orange glow caused by the setting sun behind us, and I decided to shoot photos and video with my iPhone as part of my effort to demonstrate that these can be artistic just as much as any photo or video taken with a high end still or video camera.

I'm not labeling this video as Art because I’m not sure I’ve achieved Art in these images whether still and or moving because Art in the “Art World” these days is something much more Brobdingnagian, with a hefty lift of philosophic underpinning, and without any necessary idealistic reference to the notion of “beauty” whatsoever.*2 Now, that last, heavy sentence refers to my frustration with institutional Art shown by the major museums during this metamodern*3 era. While I’m happy to view and understand these BIG Art Shows as good Art, a steady diet of the ubiquitous oversized work mired in nebulous and abstruse ideas does becomes tiresome.

So, though this video has no lofty or deep philosophical underpinning, and its scale isn’t huge (neither in size or extent), I’m satisfied that it is a pretty and colorful shot of our beach in south Florida, a watery, windy, chilled paean to our coastal life, and that possibly entitles it to be labeled, “Art.”


Note

* Unfortunately the blogger upload of my video destroyed the HD definition and color of the iPhone video. In the future I will use U-tube instead, and a link.


This is the quality of the original video above

*1 This week the cold snap is over with highs in the low to mid 80’s, and lows above 70.   Mid winter in south Florida is characterized by a mix of what those of us from the north would call a mix of cool spring-like April, and Hot and Humid summer-like July weather.

*2 Arthur Danto coined the term “Art World” in his essay of the same name published in The Journal of Philosophy in 1964.

*3  Metamodern is the term I and many others are choosing to call this period after the Postmodern.  Refer to my link to read more.