Ola Zagozda Photography: HIPSTERS vs. PHOTOGRAPHY

Investigate the origins of the hipster photographic aesthetic and all the roads lead back to Polaroid and lomography. Even those photographs shot on digital or traditional film clung to the Polaroid's visual characteristics; a thin palette of muted ambers and blues and over – exposed flash (Apple created a special application for iPhone that applies those effects on your picture or video automatically). For it's object the hipster aesthetic took pale, slender-tighted women with messy hair and dark make-up – models from the Polaroid casting-call portraiture - and men who, if dressed at all, dress for the medium (athletic socks, tight-fitting trousers and mustache) as if stepping into the Polaroid frame necessarily meant stepping into the look of '70s.

The Polaroid SX-70 was released in 1972 and that was the only mass camera before the digital that could do what the modern technology does. It could produce photographs that were both instant and private. So by the time (2001) digital cameras became cheaper and more accessible and good enough to compete with film, the Polaroid Corporation bankrupted and completely stopped producing instant film in 2008. The digital medium was cheaper to use and offered plenty more options of working with the picture in terms of post production. But for hipsters a rare and dying form seemed more attractive. With it's roots in basement porn, modeling headshots and crime scene photography, the look of the Polaroid seemed to give all subjects a sense of sexy authenticity. It also worked really well with the hipster mood of irony and nostalgia. It offered a sense of rawness and possibility of self-construction (ability to watch one's own image appear on film and then adjust and shoot again). Even amateurs could create this atmosphere of spontaneity in two dimensions (as taking pictures and being in the them).

Andy Worhol

a father and inspiration standing behind modern hipsters - photographers;

"Warhol all but disappear at the parties unless he was taing pictures with his Polaroid camera"

Cory Kennedy -> http://itscorykennedy.wordpress.com/

"At the height of her fame, authenticity, desirability, specificity, inventiveness - her "roundness" as a character - the female hipster existed before the camera, photogenic and photographed; and so it was here, through the lens , that the hipster feminine came into definition. She may have remained a muse and a subject, flattened and available for exploitation. But if so, she was a muse for herself, and for other women. "

What was the hipster? Sociological investigation.