Like Polaroid, a medium fit for simple snapshots.


By RUTH LA FERLA


Justin Giunta thinks of his camera phone as a kind of appendage. “It’s like an extension of my eyelid,” said Mr. Giunta, a jewelry designer. He uses it to discreetly snap classical portraits, which he likes to juxtapose against contemporary advertising images.

Using his device, usually an iPhone, “is a way of walking the viewer through the way I look at the city,” he said. And a way of recording colors, shapes and textures that ultimately filter into his designs.

Two of his portraits, a detail from a Modigliani sphinx, shot at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan; and another, from a billboard, taken at a subway platform, were on view recently at the Stephen Weiss Studio in downtown Manhattan, part of an exhibition conceived to introduce the Casio Exilim Mobile camera phone.

To underscore what the company says are the phone’s advanced capabilities, one was given to each of 14 artists, who were asked to chronicle a week in their lives.

The concept isn’t original: Photographers like Philip-Lorca diCorcia have performed such promotional stunts in the past.

The show’s attraction was that it highlighted the rise of the camera phone as a totem of cool. Matthew Kristall, Danielle Levitt and Ricky Powell are among those who have embraced the palm-size device as a medium for spontaneous, if inadvertently gritty, expression.

The pictures’ imperfections are part of their charm. “They kind of remind you of Polaroids in the way they’re very small and kind of glowing,” said Vince Aletti, a curator of the Richard Avedon show at the International Center of Photography.

James Danziger of the Danziger Project gallery doubts that camera-phone images will ever have merit as art. “Where they are most interesting is in a journalistic situation,” he said.

Cass Bird, whose ethereally lighted portraits were on view at the Weiss studio, said her favorite images “are just intimate moments, that if you had to bust out a conventional camera, you probably would miss.”

For fashion designers the camera phone has a practical draw. Chrissie Miller, a sportswear designer whose portraits of Lindsay Lohan and others were in the show, has jettisoned the conventional mood board in favor of camera-phone images, which she loads on to her computer. When she needs a creative jolt, “I just look at the screen,” she said.

For the exhibition, she acknowledged having paid extra attention to composition and lighting. Just the same, she continues to share the preoccupations of her self-documenting peers in fashion.

“I didn’t want to do anything artsy,” she said. “I just wanted these pictures to be a real snapshot into my life.”





A New York gallery showed phone photos by Chrissie Miller, above, and Matthew Kristall.