Enthusiasts can benefit a lot from surrounding themselves with like-minded people. It helps them fuel each other’s passion for the craft and continue to get better at it.

The Facebook group ‘Minimalist Photography’ is a perfect example of such a place. It embraces both classical minimalism and post-minimalism, or the so-called artistic (or conceptual) minimalism, and invites people to share their works.

“We look for uncluttered artistic images of quality and originality,” the team running the group writes in its ‘About’ section.

Founded all the way back in March 2005, the community now unites 285K members. “We have evolved [our] rules over several years and they seem to work to keep the timeline focused on the artwork and the room a civil, respectful, and enlightening place.”

Continue scrolling to check out our hand-picked collection of some of the group’s most popular images.

I don’t know how much time you spend looking back through your photo library. I can’t say I do it very much, unless I need to go back in time to track down a very specific photo. But I’ve currently got Google Photos installed on my iPhone, and Google Photos is very aggressive when it comes to notifications, particularly when it comes to photos taken long ago.

It was one such notification that caught my eye — Google Photos calling out a photo I had taken 18 years ago. I’m used to having old photos surface on my iPhone — i’ve even set up a widget on my home screen that shows images of my daughter from my Photos library. But those images are usually a year or two old. Here was Google Photos, serving up an image that was old enough to vote.

That was when it hit me — I’ve been taking digital photos for two decades now. And going back through my photo library reveled not just memories of old trips and family get-togethers. It showed me how far cameras have come in the last 20 years and why today’s best camera phones truly impress.

The oldest shots in my Google Photos library date back to 2002. They came from a Canon PowerShot S200, the first digital camera I ever bought. Yes, kids, back in those days, if you wanted a camera close at hand, you had to buy one separately. The Canon PowerShot S200 delivered a 2MP camera packed into a not exactly svelte 3.4 s 2.2 x 1.1-inch body that I remember not fitting into my pocket particularly comfortably. But it did the job.

Or at least, it did the job as well as a point-and-shoot camera could in 2002. The above picture of my and my wife in Kauai is decent enough, but you can really see the limits of 2002-era photography. The scene is horribly backlit — you can’t make out much of the background at all. And you’d have a hard time picking us out of the shadows as well.

I can’t help but wonder what advances in computational photography over the ensuing two decades might have done for that photo. I could have used something like Apple’s Smart HDR, which combines different exposures to call out more detail in a shot, particularly in photos where there’s a lot of contrast between light and dark areas. With more advanced photo processing, my wife and I may not looked so murky and maybe some of the background wouldn’t have been so over-exposed.

On that same trip, I took a photo of the Na Pali coast from the vantage point of a heiicoptor cockpit. It’s a decent-enough photo in that I capture a view you can only see from the air or sea, but the challenge of shooting through a window on a not especially clear day proved too much for a 2002-era camera. Better photo-processing aided by AI would have probably cleaned up that photo considerably.

Any older shot in my Photos library that I took at night had me immediately longing for a night mode that managed to call out more detail in low-light photos. Once again with my trusty PowerShot by my side, I captured the final score of a rare University of California win over a hated film school from down south as darkness fell on the Berkeley hills. Thank goodness for the lights on the scoreboard, because that’s the only thing that allowed me to capture the moment. 

The 2003-era advertisements lining the scoreboard are all but impossible to see. (A shame since that ad for the company Cingular makes me feel like there’s a bright future ahead for that outfit.) A night mode might have helped out — or at least a dedicated telephoto lens with an optical zoom.

Just so that we don’t pick on 20-year-old Canon point-and-shoots, let’s turn our attention to some early smartphones to look at how their photographic output held up. The answer? Not very well.

This 13-year-old shot of my nephew clutching his favorite pet chicken was taken  by an iPhone 3G. Yes, neither 6-year-olds nor chickens are known for their ability to hold still while uncles fumble with their smartphones, but this picture is remarkably blurry. I’m guessing whatever merits the iPhone 3G’s 2MP camera brought to the table, image stabilization wasn’t one of them.

The irony, of course, is that if I were viewing this photo on a Pixel 7 and not an iPhone 12, I might be able to clean it up with the help of the Tensor G2-powered Photo Unblur feature. Just for grins, let’s see what happens when we try the Photo Unblur feature using a Pixel 7a.

You know what? That’s a lot cleaner. And it certainly helps underscore the point that there have been a lot of advances in mobile photography over the past 20 years when even a midrange phone from 2023 can take a 2010 photo and make it look a lot better.

Spend some time looking at older images in your photo library, and you really come to appreciate what phone makers have done in the era of the smartphone. Certainly, increasing the megapixels has helped — I’m trying to imagine the reception Tim Cook would get if he unveiled an iPhone with the iPhone 3G’s 2MP sensor. But wider apertures that let in more light, bigger sensors that capture more detail and optical image stabilization that steadies even the shakiest hand play a big role, too.

I don’t look at those old photos in my library and despair at their quality — memories are memories and the photos I have represent the best technology I had available at the time. But I do see some of those old photos and appreciate what I have at my disposal now. It’s pretty amazing what today’s phone makers can squeeze into a camera phone.

More from Tom’s Guide

I spent a good chunk of my life working in book publishing and have occasionally been told “You must enjoy all those launch parties.” Not so long ago I was involved in a book that really deserved one but didn’t get it. So what went wrong, and why?

The book, Covid Street: Photographers United, certainly merited a fancy bash, with champagne flowing and all the contributors taking their moment of limelight. It was never to happen of course, and not just because pandemics aren’t conducive to parties. After all, it didn’t stop the British Prime Minister!

The book, the brainchild of street photographer Tanya Nagar, was to source the images she had already been collecting on Instagram of the spreading lockdowns around the world and assemble them into book form in aid of MSF. It proved a more time-consuming process than we first hoped – it’s a lot easier to persuade people to share something at low res via Instagram than to deliberately send you print-quality files. 

The main reason, though, was that parties aren’t really a part of a sensibly-funded publishing model. Like any book, I wanted to make more money for this project than we spent, so we could give proceeds to the charity Médecins Sans Frontières. 

It was also true that not every contributor would even be able to afford their own copy of the book or copies for their families so it would seem insulting to fund a venue, snacks, and so forth from the book’s budget even if travel restrictions allowed it. 

And that’s the key point. Most illustrated or photographic books don’t really make a lot of money. They sit in an awkward middle; expensive to print, occupying a niche area of interest, and very rarely of interest to the chattering classes or literary snobs. A party, even a modest one, would be a measurable part of the income of the book.

But would it have persuaded more people to buy it? Perhaps. Though you have to arrange the not inconsiderable costs of shipping copies to the event and, quite possibly, away again. Unlike a novel or monograph, signatures aren’t really desirable.

This is why, in the better part of two decades in publishing, I only once went to a launch party, and that was futile self-indulgence on the part of the author. (Or, seen differently, a generous re-distribution of their advance, back in the days when such a thing existed, to the minions.)  

Now, sure, the one percent seem gleefully able to dance from one charity ball to the next, and perhaps that was our mistake. Instead of thinking of the book as, well, a book with a proportion ring-fenced for the charity, we should have spent more time tapping up potential donors. Who knows?

It is Always Summer Somewhere – Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos

Calm water under a serene sky is the very image of relaxation. For others, however, the sea is a frontier, synonymous with danger and, potentially, death. For two months, Kosmatopoulos divided her days between a summer holiday and her work in the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos. Her pictures, edited with white blocks to hide pleasure boats, refer this double symbolism of the sea

Kent Andreasen’s distinctly sharp yet ethereal style combines an entirely self-taught photography approach with studies in cinematography. The Cape Town-based photographer’s energy for adventure and intuitive sense for a story made him the perfect match for the new Kisawa Sanctuary, photographed for Wallpaper’s June 2023 Travel issue, a ‘resort-to-research’ hotel in Mozambique which harnesses the power of luxury tourism to fund scientific projects. Here, Andreasen tells us more about predetermination as a process and his exploration of memory. 

Wallpaper*: Describe your style/process

Kent Andreasen: It’s sometimes hard to articulate the way I work because I find it very simple, but I think that’s also because I have worked at making it that way. When it comes to commercial work, I generally do a bit of research on the place I am set to visit, and other than that, I take the equipment I feel I need and let my stay almost come to me. I go out and remain receptive to the experiences while asking the right questions. The work ends up making itself.

With my personal work and fashion images, the process is thought out, admittedly sometimes too much. I come up with a set of ideas that I then formulate into a shot list. I accompany them with the type of person I am keen to photograph, as well as any props they may need, and I go from there. The images are predetermined as best as I can.

W*: How did you bring your way of working to the Kisawa Sanctuary shoot for Wallpaper*?

KA: I kept it simple and straightforward. The weather wasn’t playing along for most of the trip, but you adjust, and as with most trips, you make a set of images that make sense when curated properly together. I’m quite lucky with how I work because it doesn’t require these massive moments to unfold in front of me.

W*: What’s the most interesting thing happening within photography now?

KA: I would say the fear response to AI. I find it more fascinating than the technology itself. Other than that, the photography book Some Say Ice by Alessandra Sanguinetti is probably the most exciting set of images I have seen so far this year.

W*: What’s on your radar? 

KA: Like most South Africans, I am quite concerned about the state of our country at the moment and our leaders’ complete inability to make any informed decisions on how to run this beautiful place. I feel like I need a break from the place and to figure out how I want to continue working here and in what capacity.

W*: What’s next for you this year? 

KA: I have a book coming out in the next few months called Memory Bank. It has just entered the design phase. It’s about my memories, failed memories, and all that makes me human. I’m looking to head to Europe and the US once I have a dummy of it to show to publishers and galleries. I’m also working on a few other projects that I hope to wrap up by the end of the year but they aren’t worth talking about just yet.

kentandreasen.com