Knox Bronson

Narrative iPhoneography

Narrative iPhoneography

BY KNOX BRONSON

Composer, iPhoneographer, Curator

California, USA

Immersed in the iPhoneography movement, curating the web portal “Pixels—The Art of the iPhone”, Knox Bronson is one of the mobile art movement’s strongest evangelists. Now he shares his own intense, highly saturated, bold and graphic work, plus a chunk of his esthetic.

Knox is a purist, stating unequivocally that the medium is defined by the iPhone itself: no off-device image-capturing or editing allowed.

The Golden Ratio—I only used two apps on this image, standbys since the early days: “ToyCamera” and “Lo-Fi”. I would shoot the same picture over and over using “ToyCamera” set to Random, and saving my favorite results to the camera roll. You never know exactly what you are going to get with “ToyCamera”, and the app “Lo-Fi” also reacts differently to the gradations, saturation, and textures of any given image. I loved playing with the two apps in tandem and creating combinations that work like subliminal narratives. Sometimes, my diptychs are created as graphic visuals only, but if the viewer sees some hidden truth, some magical message, so much the better.

Spirit Guide—The little boy was shot in the SFMOMA under a tracking spot in the foyer. The creature is a piece of statuary in a nearby alley. I played with the color of both of these using the app “Photo fx”, then added a fair amount of grain. I pulled them into “Lo-Fi” but they seemed ununified. I shot a picture of my rice paper shade in the living room and layered it in using “DXP”. That seemed to tie both elements together, creating an image that‘s powerful and mysterious. The brain of the viewer can’t help but create an association between two images combined into a diptych, but the real power of the piece lies with the artist’s choices for those individual images.

Autoerotic—I took a number of shots of this little car in San Francisco’s mission district one afternoon, thinking I would do the usual vintage-y grungy old car treatment. Using “Photo fx”, I adjusted tints, contrast, cropping, and then I started noticing the design details and thought I might make a triptych … I assembled the images in the app “Diptic”, looking for the right combination. I felt the image needed a little something, so I added grain using “Photo fx”. The result is an abstraction, but with elements that feel tactile and somehow familiar.

Sun of Man—We needed an image for the flyer for the first Giorgi Gallery show in early 2010. I went to the hat store, got the bowler, and took pictures of myself, holding the mirror in one hand, my iPhone in the other.

The original shot required forty attempts, all using “ToyCamera” set to Random.

The original was cropped and desaturated for use as a poster and flyer.

I used “Filterstorm” to adjust the color, toning down the reds and oranges, and brought it into “Photo fx” for a slight vignetting.

This piece is a homage to Magritte’s iconic Son of Man, part of the joke being the Apple logo on the iPhone.

Bebe Gun—My friend Kelly’s chihuahua, Bebe, is extremely photogenic: I’ve used her in several works, and in this frame her arms are folded back neatly and her look is right into the lens. The pattern in the left frame is the wallpaper in the rest room of my favorite Mexican restaurant. I got the idea for adding a gun, but I don’t own one so I googled “handgun” and shot it off my computer screen, which added that great moiré pattern.

I layered the gun and the wallpaper together in the app “DXP”, then brought both images into “Lo-Fi” to create the diptych. I find the juxtaposition of the two images quite humorous, although others have expressed various emotions such as horror or profound sadness. This is the beauty of combining incongruous images, where the net result in the mind of the viewer is always in doubt.

The Bottle—This was shot one sunny afternoon on Telegraph Avenue around the corner from where I live. Using “PhotoForge”, I cleaned up a huge amount of litter and spots on the sidewalk, a painstaking process.

There were some other distracting elements behind the bus kiosk, including a poster where the red rectangle now is, and I cleaned them up as well. I hand-painted the red solid using “Effect Touch”. I brought the picture into “TiltShift Generator” and made the bottle the focal point, lightly blurring the rest of the image. I then brought the picture into “Effect Touch” to further sharpen and highlight the bottle, which makes this image so poignant.

Sex Bomb III—The bottom image is a blue mannequin who lives in my kitchen. I call her Blue. I inverted the image and layered in the moiré pattern I captured shooting the computer screen with my iPhone. The mushroom cloud was shot off the television, and I brought both into “Lo-Fi” to exaggerate saturation and gradations of color. In “DXP”, I layered different versions of the same image together and

applied different layer effects until I found something I loved. I composited the final diptych in “Lo-Fi”. Hot and cold, life and death; I wanted to create something bold and implicitly sexual, combined with the suggestion of utter annihilation.