Channel 13 · Morning show · 11 May 2022
Photography in the Age of Smartphones
A television feature on CHIEF’s iPhone work and the exhibition.
Watch on YouTube ↗“If you can do this with an iPhone, imagine what you could do with a real camera.”
Eran Yerushalmi, known as CHIEF, heard that sentence again and again. He never switched to the “real” camera. He kept shooting on iPhone: seventeen years, sixteen generations of iPhone, roughly 30,000 photographs. Since 2010 all of his work has been shot and edited on the phone.
It started at home. In 2010 he photographed his older daughter Mia asleep on the sofa, and her reflection in a mirror. Tiny files, a few hundred pixels across. The eye was already there.
From there he went out to the shore and the streets of Tel Aviv. He works close to the ground, at the edge of the water and inside it, waiting for the moment when a puddle turns a street upside down or the low sun turns a passer-by into a silhouette. Over the years Emma, his younger daughter, and Dylan, the family dog, joined the frame.
The work has reached exhibitions, large-format prints, Channel 13, Yedioth Ahronoth, Maariv and the Tel Aviv–Yafo Municipality’s channels.
So what would have happened with a real camera? This page is the answer.
One iPhone at a time, from a 2–3 megapixel phone in 2010 to the 48 megapixel iPhone 16 Pro Max. Every photograph is shown in its full original frame, under the model it was shot on, with the size of the original file. The camera changes on every page. The eye does not.