Huawai Photography exhibition at the Saatchi

One of the exhibition rooms I visited in the Saatchi was a photography exhibit sponsored by the mobile phone brand Huawai. In this exhibition all of the photographs had been taken on mobile phones. I was simply gob smacked. This work looked just as good as photography in the traditional sense but had been produced by the very thing I had in my pocket at this point. Gob smacked. As I wandered around, the theme being about self, I noticed the artistic creativity that was allowed to come out through the use of the mobile phone. One of the artists had used a layering affect, using a photograph of her holding a photograph of her holding a photograph of her. Eye catching and not at all ruined by knowing this was achieved on a smart phone. Moving around the room there was a huge amount of playful image making going on, other people using multiple images to create one image, using editing and drawing on the surface of the image digitally. The second most engrossing piece of work used mirrors and hands to create intriguing images that looked like that of creatures from a different planet. The exhibition, by the end of my viewing of it, didn’t feel as though the tools used impacted the outcome at all, which raised the question in my head of the importance of material used and method of achieving the overall effect. All I know is that I am going to begin to rethink the tools I ‘need’ in order to complete my work through photography as well as begin to broaden my understanding of what I can achieve, placing a vastly increased amount of importance onto the content rather than the tools.