The big business of bad photography
User-generated photography and ancillary apps are changing the way we look at pictures says Cathie McGinn. 
One of the most significant areas of growth in online content is the rise of amateur photography. And not just amateur: flat out no-talent-required point-and-click mobile phone app photography. Take a snap of your own shoes, a fallen leaf, some urban graffiti, add a grainy filter and you’re an artist.
When someone asked Bob Dylan if he wanted to view a particularly spectacular sunset, he sneeringly replied, “I seen it yesterday”, and most Instagrammed/Hipstamatic tilt-shifted images often leach colours and clarity from sunsets and landscapes until they’re all but interchangeable. Nonetheless, there’s a cultural shift here, a sense in which the way users are sharing images of the world as they see it, is important. Australians are voracious users of smartphones, and so carry a basic camera wherever they go, and that gives us all the opportunity to share moments from our lives in an instant – good, bad, pretty or drab.
