Good Photographs

There’s this black-and-white photo of a raccoon by Blake Marvin that’s stuck with me. It’s from Apple’s global iPhone photography competition, and the thing is—it’s genuinely good. Not good for a phone camera good. Just good. The raccoon’s caught in the middle of what looks like a heist, eye contact with the photographer, and there’s this perfect composition of the hollow log interior that frames the whole moment. It was shot on an iPhone XS Max, which matters less than the fact that someone saw this and knew how to capture it.

Apple runs this Shot on iPhone thing where photographers from around the world submit their best work, and they pick the winners to put on billboards and in stores. The 2019 round was genuinely diverse—people from Germany, Israel, Singapore, the US, Belarus. The photos showed colorful city landscapes, curious animals, reflections, the kind of stuff that matters to you when you’re actually paying attention to the world around you.

What gets me about contests like this is how little it matters anymore that you started with a phone instead of a Canon or whatever. A good photograph is a good photograph. The technical quality across different iPhone models—from the older 7 to the newest Max—is solid enough that the camera stops being the barrier. It’s all about what you see and when you press the button.

The jury was full of photographers I’d actually heard of, people whose work matters, and they were taking this seriously. The raccoon moment they highlighted was funny and sharp, but so were the other images—there’s real craft here, real eye. These aren’t Instagram snapshots; they’re people doing something with the constraints they have.

I think what matters is that nowhere in that process does it say best iPhone photo. It’s just best photo. The phone happened to be the camera. That shift—where the tool becomes invisible because it works—that’s when everything changes.