Confronting the Unbelievable

By in Photography

Confronting the Unbelievable

When the photographer Irina Rozovsky moved from Boston to Athens, Georgia, she began taking walks around her new neighborhood. She’d push her daughter’s stroller to a nearby wooded path, trying to get the baby to sleep, and photograph what she could along the way. One day in 2018, after a storm, the path was flooded. A young girl stood in the bright sun at the edge of the murky water, observing the strange new scene before her—“confronting the unbelievable,” as Rozovsky puts it. The image reminded Rozovsky of the fairy-tale trope of a child getting lost in the forest. “It’s both a romance and a nightmare,” she told me.

Rozovsky’s untitled photograph will be on display this fall at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, as part of the exhibition “A Long Arc: Photography and the American South Since 1845.” In an introduction to an accompanying book, the Atlantic contributing writer Imani Perry reflects on the 21st-century photographers who capture the region’s distinctive landscapes with compositions that evoke a 19th-century sense of the sublime. In the South, Perry writes, “nature takes over everything that humans create and destroy.”

Rozovsky insists that the work is not making an environmental statement. As a mother, she worries about the role that humans have played in warming the world her daughter will inherit. But as a photographer, she told me, she was drawn to this particular scene for its “serene and surreal” beauty, its unsettling scale.

A relative newcomer to the South, Rozovsky has been struck by the high drama of its nature. “It can be so wild,” she said, even just down the street in Athens. She’s not religious—but when trees fall, or a path floods like this, Rozovsky said, it can feel almost biblical. “There’s something larger than us.”

This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “Confronting the Unbelievable.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Requiem For Royalties: NFT Exchanges Abandon Recurring Compensation For Artists

By in Art World News

Requiem For Royalties: NFT Exchanges Abandon Recurring Compensation For Artists

OpenSea, once the leading marketplace for non-fungible tokens, was built on a promise of perpetual royalties for digital artists. Then came upstart Blur, whose no-fee, trader-friendly platform put the focus on pricing and costs.

By Maria Gracia Santillana Linares, Forbes Staff

It only took a few months to kill the art world’s utopian dream of long-lasting income streams for content creators.

As of September 1, OpenSea, once the leading marketplace for art linked to non fungible tokens, rescinded its policy of mandatory royalty payments to NFT creators. The decision came after it lost its dominance to no-fee competitor Blur, which only appeared on the scene in October but then quickly gobbled up market share by not charging platform processing fees and became the top NFT trading site in February. Overall NFT trading volume has plummeted from about $5.36 billion in January 2022, according to The Block, to $410 million in August. OpenSea’s share of the struggling NFT market has plummeted to under 30%.

Besides the lack of platform fees, Blur does not force sellers to abide by royalty agreements, which creators who launch their works on OpenSea and a few smaller marketplaces can require on transactions in their artworks after the initial sale. OpenSea, which did police such arrangements, said it would no longer do so after August 31, and it seems unlikely that many buyers will offer the payments.

Without the guarantee of a long-term royalty stream, the appeal of creating works linked to NFTs lessens, and prices for the kind of computer-generated art often linked to the tokens are plunging anyway. So why should artists bother with NFTs?

“Making art is an act of risk-taking,” says Amy Whitaker, associate professor of art business at New York University. “It makes sense, therefore, for artists to share in the upside that they helped to create.” She termed OpenSea’s decision to abandon royalties “unfortunate.”

Digital works encoded onto blockchains rose in popularity in 2021 after the artist Beeple sold a collection of images previously published on his Instagram page for $69 million. Seeing the big bucks to be made in a seemingly simple process–just upload a digital file to an NFT marketplace, which would encode it, for a fee, onto a blockchain–hundreds, if not thousands of artists joined in. NFT aficionados, including artists and collectors, claimed that blockchain-linked art would democratize access to a murky and difficult-to-break-in market, making the opaque system of well-connected galleries and deep-pocketed buyers obsolete. The decentralized system for royalty payments, they contended, would also ensure that artists would directly participate in the appreciation of their works, typically earning a 10% cut on each subsequent sale.

Each marketplace maintained its own policy for awarding royalties to artists. Beeple for example, famously would sell his “drops” for $1 each, but as they were bid up and resold on NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway for hundreds of thousands of dollars, he earned tens of thousands in royalties on each transaction.

In its brief life, NFT-linked art has largely been digital, often in series of similar images with various unique features that make some more collectible than others. But anything can be linked to a token–traditional art, real estate, even musical instruments–and then tracked on its associated blockchain. So, the technology could speed transactions and cut out middlemen in many industries.

The fight for royalty payments has largely played out in the court of NFT marketplaces, websites that allow creators and sellers to list their pieces in primary and secondary transactions. In order to better compete with Blur, OpenSea launched what it called its operator filter, which allowed creators of NFTs to prohibit their tokens from being sold in marketplaces that did not enforce royalties. In other words, the filter blocked OpenSea’s competitors and required collections to trade either on its own marketplace or others that did enforce royalty payments, keeping them away from Blur.

Market forces did not cooperate with OpenSea’s strategy. Free trades and optional royalty payment policies quickly drew sellers, which in turn attracted buyers. Since prices and volume were controlled by traders, seeking quick, if marginal, returns, voluntarily paying royalties to artists were easily dismissed by them.

OpenSea’s trading volume plummeted to 27% in August as Blur’s skyrocketed from a mere 5% to 60% in the same time frame, according to data from The Block. Even OpenSea Pro, OpenSea’s no-fee aggregator and direct competitor to Blur which launched in April, has been unable to take market share from Blur, accounting for only 33% of trading volume on NFT aggregators in August (63% of trades happened on Blur), according to data from Dune Analytics.

But the playing field is not level for OpenSea. With no marketplace fee, Blur is living mostly on its $11 million in venture capital funding and a hefty supply of blur tokens, reward tokens given out to its founding team and traders as rewards for using the platform. While Blur has attempted to grow its customer base with the launch of its lending products (Blend) and more uses for its token, how long its dominance will last will depend on its reliance on its token model, which could make it susceptible to regulatory action.

Ultimately, OpenSea has not only lost market share to Blur, but it is taking a smaller piece of a smaller pie. After peaking at $16 billion in January 2022, NFT trading has plummeted, with only $559 million worth exchanged in August in 3.2 million transactions, a more-than-60% volume decrease from last year, according to industry research firm DappRadar. Even then, only 15% of unique active wallets contributed to August’s NFT transactions. In July, only 4% of wallets traded the NFTs.

Few transactions and even fewer users (measured by the number of unique wallets) points to a new normal in NFT trading which is bad news for digital artists: traders rule the market, and most refuse to pay royalties.

Blur’s predecessors, aggregators like X2Y2 and LooksRare which listed NFTs available in various marketplaces, set the standard for royalty-free marketplaces geared toward traders by offering quick no-fee transactions. Others, like Magic Eden, the largest marketplace for NFTs on the Solana blockchain, and Ethereum-based OpenSea, had to respond to draw customers back to their platforms, lowering costs one way or another. Magic Eden took the first step, moving to a royalty-optional model in October as trading declined, preceding OpenSea by two weeks.

The royalty policy changes at OpenSea and other marketplaces should send a loud wake up call to Bored Ape Yacht Club maker Yuga Labs. Since it debuted in April 2021, Yuga has received $58 million in royalties from the resales of its Bored Ape collection. Its Mutant Ape Yacht Club and “Otherdeed” collection brought in nearly $100 million more. Chiru Labs, which designed the anime-inspired Azuki collection, and Doodles, purveyor of pastel-forward illustrations are also likely to take big revenue hits.

TOP 10 ROYALTY GENERATING NFT COLLECTIONS

Through August 2023, profile picture collections have received the most in total royalties since launch, garnering millions in fees from secondary trading. But when it comes to effective royalty rates, metaverse and gaming NFTs, with rates of 8% to 9%, are the winners.

Even prior to OpenSea scrapping royalty payments, 10% royalties were more of a goal than a reality. According to Nansen, the average royalty for the highest earning collections was between 2% and 4%. Top-performing gaming collectibles were earning 5% to 10%.

Though they stand to have the most dollars to lose, some big creators are insulated by the brand recognition they’ve garnered, including shows at traditional museums, and can still claim the big bucks on primary sales. Chiru Labs, for example, raised $38 million ahead of its much-anticipated “Elementals,” although investors ultimately thought that collection of characters with almost identical designs was a flop.

The most dire consequences of the loss of royalties are likely to fall on the smaller creators whose monthly payments have been in the hundreds or low thousands of dollars but who have included the income in their financial planning, according to Calderon.

At the $6.7-million collection Rektguy, the loss of royalties is having tangible results, says co-founder Ovie Faruq. “We’ve used royalties to pay a moderator, to put-on real-life events, to build different competitions and build our website and community,” he says. “So, when you strip that out, it changes the business model.”

Combined with the evaporating royalties, NFT participants face new U.S. regulatory issues. The Securities and Exchange Commission last month required Los Angeles-based Impact Theory, a digital media studio which raised $30 million from its NFT sales since 2021, to revise the smart contract underlying its Founders Keys NFTs to eliminate any royalty payment the company may receive from future secondary market transactions. The SEC alleges the company sold unregistered crypto securities through its sale. Because Impact collects and profits from the royalties (set at 10%), rather than the digital artist, the SEC contends, its NFTs are securities. This week, the SEC also fined the creators of the Stoner Cats collection $1 million over the sale of unregistered securities.

Impact Theory’s NFTs offered a number of exclusive opportunities to holders, including discounts and early access to videos and gaming content. To settle charges that it was selling unregistered securities–the first SEC enforcement action against an NFT issuer–Impact Theory also agreed to destroy its remaining supply of the tokens and pay a $6 million fine.

If the SEC is looking at royalty payments as a potential criterion for treating the tokens like securities, NFT studios, collectors and even the marketplaces they’re traded on could be susceptible to the same kinds of enforcement actions the agency has been taking against cryptocurrency companies. The way the Impact Theory NFTs were structured may have made them especially susceptible.

“There’s a pretty good argument for the artists receiving royalties downstream, based on certain case law,” says James Walker, co-lead of Perkins and Coie’s fintech enforcement and compliance team referring to the way the entertainment industry compensates musicians, actors and screenwriters, for example. “But there’s a stronger argument [that NFTs are securities] when you have a company [like Impact Theory] that isn’t involved in the creation that is getting royalties downstream from certain NFTs issued.”

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Rebel, rebel: how Lee Miller’s defiance in fashion, photography and life still endures

By in Photography

Rebel, rebel: how Lee Miller’s defiance in fashion, photography and life still endures

The forthcoming production of Lee, the film starring Kate Winslet based on the life of Lee Miller, has one scene in which Winslet is seen reclining in a two-piece swimsuit of the kind that a decade later would be called a bikini. It is the 1930s, when the item would have been considered “scandalous”, but it showed how the photographer and war reporter liked to defy convention. Now the bikini, along with other items from Miller’s wardrobe, has been discovered in the attic of her old home and will go on display alongside some more of clothes for the first time.

Lee Miller: Dressed, an exhibition set to open at Brighton Museum in October, brings a fashionable perspective to the life and work of the American photographer. It will include a red dress possibly created by Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli, the bikini and Miller’s war uniform

Martin Pel, the curator, says the pieces tell the story of Miller’s life and rebellion against the norms. The bikini – dated to 1937 – was a case in point. It predated the fashion by around a decade. “It would have been scandalous, really incredibly racy, to have worn it 10 years earlier,” says Pel. Miller also wore jodhpurs when trousers were not worn by women, and lent a black fur coat to her brother John, who sometimes wore women’s clothes. These are also included in the exhibition. “She really didn’t care what people thought,” says Pel. “Lee absolutely lived on her own terms.”

Miller will become a talking point again this autumn. In addition to the exhibition and film, there are two books published by Thames & Hudson.

Kate Winslet as Lee Miller in the film Lee.

Glamorous and beautiful, and part of a circle that included Picasso and Man Ray, Miller has finally emerged from these associations over the last 20 years to be rightly lauded for her brave and uncompromising images from the end of the second world war.

But Miller also has an important place in the history of fashion and fashion photography. “She’s become so well known for [the war images] that the fashion stuff is overlooked,” says her granddaughter Ami Bouhassane, who is also director of Farleys, the Sussex house that Miller lived in from the late 40s onwards. “We have five and half thousand negatives, and the war work that most people think of is only the last 18 months [of her career].”

Miller grew up in New York state and began her career as a model, working for Man Ray in Paris after convincing him to take her on as an assistant as she was familiar with photography. Romy Cockx, curator of the recent Man Ray and Fashion show in Antwerp’s Momu, says Miller influenced Man Ray’s fashion imagery. “On the one hand she was a model and on the other he was learning how to become a photographer from her.”

“I think the interplay of these elements made it sometimes like a dialogue between them.”When war broke out in 1939 Miller was an established photographer and worked for Vogue. In the early part of the war she created images that managed to turn uninspiring briefs from the Ministry of Information into creative images for the magazine. “We’ve a whole series of fashion images with models looking nonchalant next to some hairy mammoth in the Natural History Museum. She had this amazing imagination,” says Bouhassane.

Although there were other women working in photography in the 1930s and 40s – Cockx points to Berenice Abbott, also mentored by Man Ray – Bouhassane says Miller’s determined rise to the top came from her background. “Her parents gave her this incredible gift of treating her equally to her brothers,” she says. “Her natural bass line was in the space of equality. So when she hit these walls of ‘no, you can’t do that because you’re a woman’, and ‘women don’t run their own business’, she’s like, ‘yes, I can.’”

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Lee Miller’s photograph of Romanian gypsies in Sibiu, from 1938

Pel says this attitude is borne of her approach to clothing– through both an irreverence, and a desire for functionality. “I think she loved sort of shocking peopleand doing things out of the ordinary,” he says. “Her attitude to clothing [also] reminds me of a heterosexual man’s attitude to dress– she just wants it to work.”Michael O’Connor, costume designer for Lee, studied images of Miller prewar: on the beach in the south of France with Picasso and Paul Eluard, wearing the bikini, a design they replicated for the film. “In those days Lee knew how important clothes were,” he says. “She was part of a set of dapper people – she’s sitting on a picnic blanket with Picasso and she’s a confident part of that scene.”

The film focuses on Miller’s life during the end of the war, but even in this period “her eye for fashion was so acute,” says O’Connor. “Audrey Withers, the editor of Vogue, had Miller’s Class A uniform tailored on Savile Row, we know that from the label in the original. So Winslet went to Savile Row to have hers tailored.” Withers is also said to have sent Miller nice underwear “so she could feel feminine” even under horrific circumstances.

Miller was traumatised by the war and stopped taking pictures soon after. However, her influence can be seen in postwar photography. “The way she brought this more humane aspect to fashion photography influenced British photographic trends in the 60s, reemerging in the work of Lord Snowdon and David Bailey,” says Cockx.

There’s also the now familiar switch from model to photographer – a move that other women including Corinne Day have made recently. Bouhassane says: “She’d been a model so she knew what it felt like to be on the other side of the camera. We’ve got some really great shots where she’s having a giggle with the models, they seem really relaxed.”

Wildenstein Art Dynasty Faces a Tax Trial in France

By in Art World News

Wildenstein Art Dynasty Faces a Tax Trial in France
image

Guy Wildenstein, the billionaire art dealer, is accused of shielding a prized art collection from tax authorities to avoid a hefty inheritance bill. The case has dogged his family for more than a decade.

Guy Wildenstein, the international art dealer, is scheduled to return to court in Paris this week to face accusations of massive tax fraud and money laundering in a lengthy legal battle that has slowly chipped away at the prestige and secrecy of a family dynasty that once dominated the global art market.

French prosecutors are on their third attempt to convict Mr. Wildenstein, 77, whom they say hid significant chunks of his family’s storied art collection and other assets in a dizzying labyrinth of trusts and shell companies when his father, Daniel, died in 2001, and after his brother, Alec, died in 2008. The motive, according to the prosecutors, was to avoid paying hundreds of millions of euros in inheritance taxes.

Mr. Wildenstein, the Franco-American family patriarch and president of Wildenstein & Co. in New York, was acquitted of the tax fraud and money laundering charges in 2017. That ruling was upheld by a higher court but then overturned in 2021 by France’s top appeals court, which ordered a new trial to be held, beginning Sept. 18.

The Wildensteins, a family of French art dealers spanning five generations since the 1870s, were notoriously secretive about their collection, which included works by Caravaggio, Fragonard, Manet and many others.

As a result, there is no full accounting of the many masterpieces thought to be in a collection that has at various times been scattered across the globe. A Swiss free port, a nuclear bunker in the Catskill Mountains of New York, a former fire station in that state and a vault in Paris are among the many places parts of the collection have been stored. The family also has galleries in New York and Tokyo, as well as a prestigious research institute in the heart of the French capital.

But since the 2000s, repeated legal entanglements slowly lifted the curtain on the Wildenstein business, many of them the result of suits filed by women in the family who were cut off from its vast fortune during messy divorces and inheritance squabbles.

Claude Dumont Beghi, a lawyer who represented Sylvia Wildenstein, Daniel’s widow, over allegations that her stepsons cheated her out of her inheritance, said that the mounting legal woes were “a bit like a cluster bomb.”

“It was an extremely discrete dynasty,” said Ms. Dumont Beghi, who became a confidant for Sylvia until her death in 2010 and was closely enmeshed in the case against the Wildensteins. She published several books about the family and was sued for defamation by Mr. Wildenstein in 2016, although he later dropped the suit.

Now, Ms. Dumont Beghi said, “this case has put the spotlight on them.”

State prosecutors allege that the Wildensteins were responsible for “the longest and most sophisticated tax fraud” in modern French history, by concealing art and other assets under complex trusts registered in far-flung places like the Bahamas or the Channel Islands, and by whisking away millions of dollars in artworks to tax havens.

Daniel Wildenstein, left, and Alex, his son, in 1963.John Orris/The New York Times

In doing so, prosecutors say, the family grossly underestimated its enormous wealth and assets, which at the time also included properties in Paris and New York, a sprawling ranch in Kenya, and a number of thoroughbred horses.

A lawyer representing Mr. Wildenstein in France declined to comment. In the past, his defense has been that he had been told by legal advisers that he did not have to disclose artwork to tax authorities if it was technically owned by trusts and not by the family itself.

Tax fraud carries a maximum prison sentence of seven years and potentially hefty fines, in addition to any back taxes. It is still unclear what financial penalty prosecutors will seek against Mr. Wildenstein if he is convicted at the new trial, but at previous ones they had sought a 250 million euro fine, or about $268 million.

Seven other defendants — who had also been previously cleared — are also standing trial in Paris.

They include Mr. Wildenstein’s nephew, Alec Jr., and his estranged sister-in-law, Liouba Stoupakova, who had been married to his brother Alec. Ms. Stoupakova has been locked in a legal battle of her own against the Wildensteins over her share of the proceeds from trusts created by her late husband. A coterie of Swiss and French legal and financial advisers and foreign trust companies also stand accused.

In past trials, judges had ruled that although the family had demonstrated a “clear intention” to conceal its wealth, its actions were either past the statute of limitations or fell into a legal gray area, before France enacted legislation in 2011 that requires foreign trusts to be declared to the authorities.

Léa Saint-Raymond, an economist and art historian at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, said the Wildensteins had over the decades built a vast information-gathering network, by buying up the correspondence of artists or their dealers, by keeping close tabs on which collectors owned what, by becoming the publishers of a famous French art review and even by digging through notarial archives to find lost paintings.

“They are an indispensable part of the market thanks to the information they have gathered since the 19th century,” Ms. Saint-Raymond said. “And information is the lifeblood of the art market.”

The family’s influence has waned somewhat as the tastes of the ultrarich have shifted to more contemporary art and demand for historical art has ebbed. But their trove of information is still valuable. They remain a leading authority on old masters and Impressionists and have published definitive catalogs on painters like Monet and Gauguin that give them all but final say over authentication questions.

That professional and scholarly authority will remain, at least for now, Ms. Saint-Raymond said, even if Mr. Wildenstein’s personal reputation suffers from the tax case.

“What’s really harmful is when you are suspected of trafficking false artwork,” Ms. Saint-Raymond said. Despite the trial, she added, “a Wildenstein provenance is still pretty safe.”

I’m a photographer and will be skipping the iPhone 15 Pro Max

By in Photography

I’m a photographer and will be skipping the iPhone 15 Pro Max

The iPhone 15 Pro Max is the most powerful camera Apple has ever made – yes, even trumping 1994’s long-forgotten Apple QuickTake and its 0.3MP sensor. So, considering I’m TechRadar’s former cameras editor and am rocking an iPhone 11 Pro, you’d think it’d be a no-brainer upgrade – but that isn’t the case.

It isn’t the 15 Pro Max’s high price tag; $1,199 / £1,399 / AU$2,099 is a lot of money, but I spent more on my Fujifilm X-T5 without any lenses. It also isn’t because the Pro Max currently isn’t shipping until at least November. After a lifetime on iOS, going all the way back to the iPhone 3GS, I’m also not ready to jump ship to Android either. 

The iPhone 15 Pro Max on a tripod with a man looking through the screen

I’m eager to try the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s new telephoto lens, but my 11 Pro’s wide-angle lens suggests there’ll be significant room for improvement next year. (Image credit: Apple)

No, my main reason for waiting until at least the iPhone 16 is a golden Apple rule I’ve successfully followed for a long time – for any new Apple product or hardware feature, always wait for its second generation.

That proved wise with the original iPhone, MacBook Air and Apple Watch. And based on the evidence so far, that’s what I’ll be doing again with what is arguably the iPhone’s biggest camera hardware change since my iPhone 11 Pro delivered Apple’s first ultra-wide lens – the 15 Pro Max’s new 5x optical zoom.

Perfectly cooked

One of the few times I didn’t follow my golden Apple rule was with the iPhone 11 Pro. It has Apple’s first ultra-wide camera and it’s pretty average. That ultra-wide camera has a tiny sensor, a slow f/2.4 aperture, and a fixed-focus lens. The photos it produces have tons of distortion around the edges. I only use it in emergencies.

Those issues were improved massively in subsequent generations, particularly the iPhone 13 Pro. This is what Apple generally does with new iPhone camera features, and I’m expecting the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s 5x optical zoom to be no different. Yes, it’s no surprise to see iPhone features improve over time – but I think it particularly pays to skip major first-gen features. 

Perhaps I should really wait until the iPhone 17 to guarantee a polished telephoto experience, but ultra-wides are notoriously tricky to perfect – so it’s understandable that it took two generations to fine-tune.

The iPhone 15 Pro Max's periscope zoom camera

The iPhone 15 Pro Max’s telephoto camera uses a ‘tetraprism’ design, which differs slightly from the periscope technology used by the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. (Image credit: Apple)

It’s possible Apple has nailed its 5x optical zoom out of the gate. I’m looking forward to trying it out, as I regularly shoot in the middle range of my XF50-140mm lens (equivalent to 76-213mm on full-frame). But Apple didn’t become the world’s most valuable company by releasing a long-awaited smartphone innovation in one go. Even if the refinements in the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro Max are mostly software-based, it feels like the smart move to wait for that second-gen telephoto experience.

On the plus side, the sensor behind the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s telephoto camera is apparently 25% bigger than the one in the iPhone 14 Pro. That will be a big bonus considering the camera’s ‘tetraprism’ design means light rays are reflected four times through its glass structure. But it’s also a 12MP sensor with an understandably slow f/2.8 aperture. And that small sensor, which has a 1.12µm pixel pitch, will be a significant handbrake on image quality.

Timing is important

Of course, the iPhone 15 Pro Max would still represent a giant leap over my 11 Pro. Even compared to last year’s 14 Pro Max, you get a bigger main camera sensor, a bunch of new focal length options (albeit cropped from that wide camera), the ability to shoot 48MP HEIF or JPEG files, speedy USB-3 file transfers and tons of Photonic engine processing upgrades.

But my other reason for waiting one more year to upgrade is that I prefer a smaller smartphone form factor. And there are growing rumors suggesting that, while the 5x optical zoom is exclusive to the 6.7in Pro Max this year, that will likely change with the iPhone 16 Pro series.

The iPhone 15 Pro Max on a tripod

While the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s 120mm lens looks handy, this graphic is slightly misleading – Apple’s new 5x telephoto lens has no zooming mechanism and has an equivalent aperture of about f/20, unlike the lens depicted (which is more like an f/2.8). (Image credit: Apple)

According to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the iPhone 16 Pro will arrive brandishing the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s telephoto camera when it lands in September 2024. And this rumor was reiterated again this week by the leaker Digital Chat Station on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo.

The downside? It sounds like the only way Apple is going to squeeze that ‘tetraprism’ camera into the iPhone 16 Pro is by slightly increasing that phone’s display and overall body size. According to display analyst Ross Young, the 16 Pro will be a 6.3in phone. I’d take that – having more phone to grip onto when you’re trying to steady a telephoto lens is never a bad thing. 

The sweet spot

Of course, there’s never a perfect time to buy an iPhone. But if you only upgrade intermittently like me, the timing of your upgrade makes a big difference. And I’ll likely get my next iPhone when it has a refined 5x optical zoom camera, rather than when Apple potentially gets tempted to match the 10x zoom of the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra.

Having a 230mm lens in your pocket may sound impressive on paper, but it isn’t a hugely usable focal length for everyday shooting. When I go out with my Fujifilm X-T5, I usually take a wide-angle lens, a 35mm or 56mm prime and my 50-140mm at most. Some of the best zoom lenses you can buy, like the Nikon Z 24-120mm f/4 S, also tend to be in that less ambitious focal range. That’s why the Google Pixel 8 Pro, due to land next month, is also sticking with its 5x telephoto camera. 

The iPhone 11 Pro next to the iPhone 15 Pro Max on a green background

Will Apple eventually move to four cameras? Despite big internal changes, my iPhone 11 Pro (left) looks largely identical to the iPhone 15 Pro Max (right). (Image credit: Apple)

Another downside of the iPhone 15 Pro Max’s camera setup – and this may well carry over to the iPhone 16 Pro – is the huge focal range gap between its 24mm main camera and that new 120mm equivalent telephoto. Unfortunately, there’s no 3x telephoto on the Max (only the iPhone 15 Pro). That’s why Apple was keen to tout its new phone’s “seven pro lenses”, which promise 28mm, 35mm and 48mm options in between the two. 

The downside? They’re really just crops from the main camera with a bit of computational photography thrown in. Still, I’m keen to try them out and I like the new ability to set one of them as your default focal length. I just wish the Pro Max had two telephoto options (a 3x and a 5x zoom), alongside its main and ultra-wide cameras.

There’s no doubt that the iPhone 15 Pro Max will likely be one of the best camera phones you can buy – maybe even the best, if Apple’s nailed its processing recipes and that 5x optical zoom doesn’t have teething issues. But while I’m keen to take it for a spin, that will almost certainly be a dry run for the upgrade I’m planning to make next year.

My iPhone 11 Pro is still an excellent pocket camera, arguably one of the best Apple has made (aside from that ultra-wide). You can pick one up for only $330 / £270 / AU$500 on the likes of Backmarket. So while the temptation to upgrade is strong, my experience with Apple is that patience usually pays off.

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The big picture: when Nick Waplington became a wedding photographer

By in Photography

The big picture: when Nick Waplington became a wedding photographer
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In 1986, Nick Waplington began documenting the lives of families on the Broxtowe council estate in Nottingham where his grandad had lived for 50 years. His first book, Living Room, gave the viewer a front-row seat to the chaotic world of a neighbour called Janet and her life-loving kids and friends. Some saw the pictures as exploitative. A Guardian critic suggested that Waplington, “had gone visiting the natives to bring back news of their exotic doings and strange gear”. The novelist Irvine Welsh responded in defence of Waplington’s project, writing: “There is no voyeuristic intrusion in this work. You see Nick appearing – as much a subject as anyone else – in his cluttered, crowded pictures, engaging in the mucking about…”

Waplington followed Living Room with a book that focused on Janet and her new partner, Clive, and their wedding day; pictures, including this one, that are included in a new retrospective book of his work, Comprehensive. Looking back on those images now, Waplington tells me that, when it came to the wedding, he was the obvious choice as photographer. “There is a certain element of voyeurism in all documentary photography,” he says, “but I was trying to work with the people in my pictures long term. They became very relaxed around me and so some of the scenes are quite hardcore.” He distrusted, he says, that tradition of photographing families like Janet’s in grainy black and white, “to make them look miserable in damp houses”. His experience, he says, “was something more positive… I just enjoyed being with them”. This particular picture came towards the close of a long day that had begun in early-morning excitement and dressing up, and which was ending in the pub on Alfreton Road in Nottingham, a couple of doors down from where he was living. “I had no choice but to stay to the bitter end,” he says.

  • Comprehensive by Nick Waplington is published by Phaidon (£69.95)

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