John Paul Caponigro just told me this yesterday: his first Apple iPhone is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
Why? Well, John Paul has been deliberately using the very latest digital tools for his real work* for more than two decades now, and the Smithsonian collects his digital tools as a useful sampling of the equipment digital photographers have been using as the present era has unfolded. (They have his first Epson inkjet printer as well as a number of other things.) They have prints of a number of the earliest images he created with a cameraphone, and the Director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History wanted the phone itself too. And is delighted to now have it, apparently.
And guess what else? The "Father-Son" print we'll be offering starting on Sunday at noon will also be added to the Smithsonian's permanent collection, a gift from an anonymous art collector who has already made the donation sight-unseen.
I just think that's cool.
Mike
*Please don't be tempted to treat that term contentiously...it's just a phrase I slapped in there. All I mean is actual finished personal artwork as opposed to testing or messing around.
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Capturing such little slices of cultural inflections is precisely what the Smithsonian is all about.
Separately, some years ago a very renowned photographic artist had also done some "real" work with one of the first iPhones. He was quite impressed with the phone's camera (although it was admittedly his first venture into digital imaging...he'd been a large-format guy most of his career). Apple got a heads-up to his work and wanted him to participate in a promotional campaign for the (then new) iPhone which he refused, feeling that such product endorsements would debase his strong stature as an artist (which it certainly would).
Interestingly, some time later this fellow was very disappointed with the camera in a replacement iPhone of the same model. It turned out that the high quality of that original model was something of a mistake according to what the Apple corporate rep told him.
So when I read this piece I had to wonder if Caponigro's original iPhone was among this "too good to be true" batch. If so, it belongs in a museum for yet another reason!
Posted by: Kenneth Tanaka | Friday, 13 September 2013 at 02:17 PM