With iPhone photography and ‘appropriated art’, Benedict Brain continues his creative journey
These images above were made with my iPhone. I have recently started using it as a more serious photographic tool – partly because I’ve just upgraded to a swanky iPhone 15 Pro Max and partly because I’m pitching a book about iPhone photography to a publisher, but mainly because it’s a damn good photographic tool. I used to use my phone to ‘sketch’ ideas, make record shots or candid family images. But recently, I’ve started reaching for my iPhone as a first-choice creative option.
These images focus on small segments of some advertising hoarding promoting a local beer somewhere in the South Pacific. I was initially seduced by the way time, light and weather had deteriorated, faded and eroded the advertisement. The tears and scars in relative close-up took on a new aesthetic that I liked. I also enjoyed the act of taking an existential step back, or in this case, forward, to isolate and decontextualise parts of the image; focusing on parts of the smiles in an extreme close-up makes them feel more demonic, manic and deranged than the happy and carefree vibe they were intended to evoke. Mischievously, I enjoy this.
I acknowledge that this is a form of appropriation and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it, but I’m not the first. These images could be seen to be in the tradition of the controversial American artist Richard Prince, who was known for
