Rian van der Merwe at Elezea talks about a Verge thread called “Filters vs. failure: Instagram’s perfect messes could spell trouble for creativity“. It’s a clickbait-y title but there’s a real issue at the core of the discussion: do our creative tech tools, especially those like Instagram (or even Auto-Tune) stifle creativity by giving makers a safe sandbox where the only “mistakes” are those caused by filter settings that make the result look weathered, damaged, or otherwise imperfect.

It’s an interesting discussion (Rian’s post also links to an article on this phenomenon as it applies to music, which is also worth reading). I can’t help but wonder what this means for photographers in publishing, where the range spans Vogue cover model perfection all the way down to snapshots of dusty corpses in war zones. How do the hyperreal, minutely controlled results of our modern creative tools influence not just the audience’s perception of the work, but also the act of creating the work itself? Is a world without accident also a world without serendipity?

Heavy, man. Heavy and perfectly sepia-toned.

Head over to the Verge and have your say, but read Rian’s post first.