Bob Poe's Moments Of Truth
by James Scarborough
Bob Poe’s photographs consist of a series of portraits that feature the eyes of a particular model, if model is the proper term. Co-conspirator, perhaps. Taken with his iPhone camera, these images embody the spontaneity of a Polaroid snapshot and the social networking capabilities of a site like Facebook. The person photographed is less a party to a staged sitting than a participant in an informal public gathering. These images may or may not be interconnected. By evidence of the photos alone, we can’t determine whether the people know each other (friends, relatives, strangers), whether the shots were snapped in the same space at the same time. Nor do we know why these particular people were chosen. But they all affirm the suspicion that the method of constructing a contemporary photographic portrait in a digital age lies less in formal and time consuming processes of creating, choosing from, and perhaps retouching a multitude of staged images, and more in affirming the essence of the offered moment with faith in a single unposed shot...
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“Bob Poe’s Happy Accident”
Fabrik Magazine
Issue No. 7
By Craig Stephens
Fine art photographer Bob Poe is an anomaly on numerous levels in today’s art world. After purchasing a first generation Apple iPhone two years ago, Poe, an autodidactic and successful entrepreneur, made the intrepid move to embrace a full-time career as a fine arts photographer, opening his own gallery—Bob Poe Photography—at Santa Monica’s salubrious Bergamot Station after strolling in one afternoon on a whim to find a vacant space. Now a recognizable figure in the increasingly legitimate genre of cell phone art photography, Poe’s entry to the world of fine art is as miraculous as his near overnight realization.
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“Bob Poe: Uncommon Images With iPhone Photography”
California Homes Magazine
February 2010
By Alexandria Sivak
Photographers often protect their cameras with the territoriality and affection of a parent. Often, the type of camera, the filtering, the subject matter, become a part of the photographer’s signature and style. If all of these considerations were bypassed and replaced with pure and passionate spontaneity, you would find the work of Bob Poe. Using only and iPhone camera, Poe is able to make uncommon images haunting and profound, and has built his collection of work on the accessibility of iPhone photography as an artistic medium.
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“Phone it in Art”
ArtWorks Magazine
Winter 2009
By Erin Clark
Is there anyone left who doesn’t believe the iPhone will take over the world? I know what the experts say about control freak Steve Jobs, and I know that Barack Obama bucked up the Blackberry a bit. To be honest, I loved mine for many years until my kids gave me the then dreaded iPhone for Mother’s day. Mother’s Day! Isn’t that when I am supposed to get pretty flowers and love notes form my children? No, my kids, the ones in charge of everything cool, insisted that I move into the creative 21st century. It took a while to adapt to the new landscape, but once I stabilized, there was no going back, and just about every creative person I know feels the same way. There was no conversion for artist Bob Poe. He was one of those people standing in line the first day the iPhone went on sale. “I see the iPhone as a cultural icon,” he says. “It’s more than a phone. It’s an electrical umbilical cord.”
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Painting With The iPhone
by Peter Frank
Photographic discourse has been turned on its head by a hoard of new devices––and a concomitant cascade of new images. Photographs are now a common part of daily communication, public and private, as integral to the way we interact with one another as is language. (Video is too, mitigated only by the time factor: while you can look at a photo or read a sentence at your own pace, you have to view a video at its.) If this is
the case, then what happens to the photograph’s hard-won (and still not fully secured) status as Art? Can a medium so readily available to everyone, and so universally exploited, still allow for artistic expression?
Bob Poe, for one, believes so. In fact, he discovered so when he began
using the very device that would otherwise have “mainlined” him into the universe of photo-communication. Wielding his iPhone, Poe found that the images he was able to capture––indeed, the images that the ubiquitous, almost sinisterly multipurposed machine tended to capture accidentally, triggered by random button-pushes by wayward digits and other bodily
extensions––struck him as alluringly mysterious and beautiful. Poe blew up various of these images––some truly accidental, some taken in the spirit of such accident––and printed them onto canvas. The result wasn’t simply artistic photography; it was, at least in the better cases, photographic art.
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