In his blog Andrew Smallman writes about the proliferation of smart phone cameras. I really like the photo he used to illustrate the point (although oddly enough there's only one person actually using a camera in it). It is the sort of scene that 1960-70s US photo-realist painters would emulate so beautifully; It celebrates the snapshot aesthetic, stripped of all painterly antecedents. Full of the inconsequential idioms of what life (sometimes) looks like when photographed, a vision attentive to every fleeting detail; the crumpled clothes, casual gestures, sunglasses, hats and bags, and reflective surfaces - depicted with a Kodak Ektacolor film palette, too. The paintings were a kind of hyper-photography that actual photography rarely lived up to - it was mostly too busy trying to look more like paintings. There is the same quality of richly rendered banality, elevated in those photo-realist paintings, that is by some miracle actually fully present in this photograph.
Richard Estes:
From an interview in 1977:
"How often have you seen, in reality, a Chardin still life--I mean a fish lying on a silver plate, a candle, and some apples... Isnt it ridiculous to set up something when the whole world is full of still life?"