Is it the end of photography? Earlier this year Kodak declared bankruptcy. Then a few weeks later the start-up Lytro began shipping its new new digital image-making device that is not, according to press copy, a camera. It certainly doesn’t look like a camera. Most point and shoot (P&S) digitals mimic point and shoot film cameras, which have oblong bodies to accommodate the spooling of a film roll. The Lytro does away with that anachronism. Its slim profile resembles that of a slide viewer, a photographer’s magnifier, or a one-eyed View-Master more than a digital camera, and it uses a square image format like a Polaroid. It stirs up instant nostalgia for old-fashioned photography.
The Lytro doesn’t catch images on a single curved plane, like the lens of a conventional camera, but catches an entire “field of light,” so that you can point and shoot without focusing and then adjust the image for resolution later, on the device’s 1 ½" x 1 ½" touch-screen, or with software on the computer. The Lytro-produced images on the company’s website all dramatize the contrast between foreground and middle ground, obliterating elements in the distance. The device takes in a very small part of the world and gives it a funky, fish-eye artsiness. The images are distinctive but they look like they could have bee produced with a PhotoShop effect or a mobile phone app. They’re digital photographs, just a little bit twisted.