If anyone understands
our relationship with technology, it’s Tesla and Spacex’s Elon Musk – the man who put veritable spaceships on our roads and will, soon enough, be putting people on Mars. “We’re already cyborgs,” he said earlier this year. “Your phone and your computer are extensions of you.” I believe it. I’m regularly in awe of the almost unfathomable superpowers we carry around in these little black boxes. The fact that somehow technology has managed to bundle up everything from a global street directory to a bank teller, a notebook, a clock, every song ever made, a shopping centre, a calculator, the meteorologist, a TV, a travel agent, many neglected personal trainers, my entire reading library, a set of encyclopedias, a meditation teacher, a dictaphone, a movieediting suite and pretty much everything else we can think of into something so small and constantly at our fingertips, blows my mind. I can’t even imagine what our grandparents must make of it all.
But of all the features in our phones, it’s the camera that has had the most impact on how we live, simply because it’s the camera we have at hand when the moments happen, so it’s the one we actually use. From the dawn of the selfie to the fact that our entire lives are now documented (how strange will that be for our children, and our children’s children, to have such an insight into who we were?), everyone these days is a photographer. Which, with its own strange logic, is how I managed to convince one of the country’s best fashion photographers, Georges Antoni, to shoot this month’s cover of Margaret Zhang, and the story inside, on an iphone. Margaret is something of a fashion renaissance woman – photographer, stylist, brand consultant and street-style superstar. She’s been such a longstanding presence in the fashion world that it feels like she’s been around for much longer than her 24 years should allow, and all of her many successes have undoubtedly been made possible thanks to the invention of the smart phone, both as a vehicle for her to showcase her talents and to grow her audience. Georges and I, along with ELLE fashion director Rachel Wayman, loved the idea of paying homage to that by shooting this ultimate newmedia darling on a phone, even as she steps into that storied role of cover girl on one of the most famous print mastheads in the world. Check out the whole story on p116, and the video of all the crazy that went on behind the scenes (ie. Georges running around after Margaret on the beach with his phone like he was some sort of deranged Instagram boyfriend) on Elle.com.au.
So we’ve shot a cover on an iphone – a fact that we hope surprises anyone who sees it (the result certainly surprised us). Does this mean professional photographers, with all that expensive equipment, are becoming obsolete? As much as I’m sure the people in charge of the ELLE budgets would love it to be true, I don’t think so. As these incredible pocket-cameras now find themselves in the hands of everyone and anyone, it means magazines like ours need photographers with an even more honed eye, more magical storytelling skills and bucketloads more vision to create a story – or a cover – worthy of making it onto the printed page, as opposed to the more fleeting existence of, say, that shot of your barista-touched latte you posted on Snapchat. Proving that, when it comes to the pages of a glossy magazine at least, it’s not just the wand but the wizard that counts. But for those of us who are regular old cyborgs rather than wizards, the wand we have in our hands will do just fine.