The War in Hipstamatic

Pictured here are a collection of images as part of photojournalism experiment ”Basetrack”. 

Every image was taken with popular iphone app “Hipstamatic“ 

Documenting the deployments of a battalion of American soldiers in southern Afghanistan, it uses various modern social media embedded technologies (twitter, facebook, GPS, iphones etc.) to document the small team of photographers and journalists embedded in the unit. 

Click the link for more information and image credits. 

There’s been debate in the photographic community about the merits over using the app in a war zone - the general consensus being that putting an artificial filter over the images lessens their impact and somehow makes them “fake”.

Not sure if I’d take that view really - they’re beautiful images, plain and simple. The iphone camera is crap, let’s face it - getting results as beautiful and important as these from it, regardless of how they’re captured, can only be a good thing.

It also leads into the debate on how far a photojournalist can use any form of manipulation before the image becomes false. 

Any opinions on this?

Images © Basetrack.