A Brief Rant About Fucking Up Perfectly Good Photos

On Facebook, there was a lovely picture of a friend of mine.  Then some asshole “fixed” it using Instagram.  Suddenly, my friend’s beautiful skin tones are all bleached out, the contrast gone, and now she looks like an idiot hipster.
What the fuck, man?
Instagram is just proof I can never predict the future, because if you’d told me, “People will pay money to make photos look like overexposed Polaroids,” I would have laughed in your face and asked seriously, where are my teleporters?  But no.  People have now come to purposely make their photos look like the mistakes of the 1970s.  In fact, we have gotten to the point where people think that a photograph that actually has some semblance of the original flesh tones of the world itself is wrong, all this lovely fidelity an error to be corrected.
Worse, they think this tweaking is fucking art.  Oh, yes, you’re very deep, iPhone owner.  You pushed a goddamned button on your iPhone to tint a picture.  I’m sure if you asked Michelangelo, who spent four years hunchbacked, teetering on unstable scaffolds as he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he’d bob his head and go, “Yes, yes, you and I?  The same.  Perhaps I spent a lifetime honing my craft with oils while you tilted your camera at an angle and selected ‘Washed out’ and called it day, but no!  We are both artists!”
No.  It doesn’t make you artistic, or quirky, or anything.  You took a fucking photo, which is the beginner rung of artistic skills; not that there aren’t brilliant photographers, but “getting the person’s face mostly in the picture” doesn’t make you fucking Annie Leibovitz.  I know, I know, it took you ten whole seconds to get the composition of that photo you took at Applebees, and your friends will call it art because they’re in it and it looks moody – and then oh my God, you apply the “sepia” filter!  That’s the stuff, man!  That’s what turns it all around!
Look, there’s also value in having photography represent real life, and what you’re doing?  It’s the Matrix bullet-dodge, the synthdrums of 1980s music, the feathered 1970s haircuts, the autotune  – it’s that stupid, overused technology you’re going to look back on in ten years and be so fucking embarrassed because everyone was doing it, and it wasn’t that good, and in hindsight you’ll come to realize you were part of a dumb, omnipresent trend where you weren’t cutting-edge, you were part of the lemminglike wave, and all those photos are just so hideously dated that when you try to show people what it was like back in the day they’re just going to ignore all the heartfelt emotions you were trying to convey about your twenty-something years and laugh, laugh, laaaaugh at the stupid Instagram, Jesus, did we all do that?  We did.  What the fuck were we smoking?
Be a real hipster.  Get ahead of the trend.