Mountaineers Jimmy Chin and Conrad Anker were trekking in the Bugaboos in southeastern British Columbia, swaddled in fluorescent alpine gear against the spires of salt-and-pepper granite. The pair were climbing solo—no belayer on the other end of the rope to catch you if you fall—and dodging 70-mile-per-hour winds at more than 10,000 feet above sea level. Anker grasped a ledge with a calloused hand, preparing to pull himself up a few feet further when Chin, bracing himself against an overhanging rock, motioned for him to stop, then reached out and snapped a picture, iPhone in hand.
Since Sean Baker shot his feature film Tangerine entirely on an iPhone, the bar for smartphone photography has risen to new heights. To prove its mettle, Apple has begun commissioning some of the world’s most celebrated photographers to produce bodies of work, wielding just an iPhone. The latest iteration of the project, now in its third year and tied to the launch of the iPhone 18 Pro, features work from Chin, Jack Davison, and Alex Prager, three very different creatives all united by a single technology. A showing of their work, titled “What Holds Us“ and curated by former longtime director of photography at The New York Times Magazine Kathy Ryan, is on display in New York at 456 W 18th Street through Sept. 20.
Chin, perhaps best known as the Academy Award-winning documentarian behind Free Solo and the upcoming Everest: The Other Side, captured the dramatic panoramas of the Bugaboos, shooting while balancing on granite ridges, soaring from helicopters, and hanging from sheer cliff faces. In Chin’s images, glaciers become abstracted, as does rushing water beneath permafrost and snow banks. There’s an immense sense of scale to the images produced: Anker, a man who is six feet of climbing muscle, appears as a sharp orange speck against the jagged Purcell vistas. The duo have been scaling the range for years (Anker was actually featured in Chin’s first documentary, Meru), and have developed a climbing rapport so strong they barely need to talk anymore to communicate.
“ When you go into those places, you are so overwhelmed with the landscape that it’s hard to take in the whole thing, but when you start to go back, you notice the details,” says Chin. “It’s easy to be overwhelmed with life. If you don’t pay attention to the details of the beauty, you could get lost in everything else.”
Meanwhile, both Davison and Prager used the iPhone as a tool for their stylized studio portraiture. Davison, with his high-contrast portraits rendered in a rich chiaroscuro, was inspired to use clay, a material both playful and somber, in his series. Against the proliferation of A.I.-generated imagery with its plasticky sheen, Davison was drawn to the tactility and spontaneity of the material. “I was thinking a lot about creation myths, making man and woman from clay,” says Davison. The models in his work for the Apple show whirl around hefty chunks of damp clay, smearing slip on their skin before it dries and crumbles to dust.
Davison’s series is also a reflection of his enduring collaborations. One model in particular stands out, an older gentleman named Ian “built like Pina Bausch,” with a long face and spindly fingers, a fashion designer, tailor, and friend of Davison’s mother-in-law whom the photographer has worked with for over 10 years. “He was in my first short film,” says Davison. “He made my wedding suit.” This sense of ease, of the passing of time, suffuses the entire series of images.
If Davison’s studio portraits capture a greyscale vulnerability, then Prager’s soundstage confections, splashed with primary colors, portray all the pleasures of artifice. A massive triptych, from the vantage point of a camera sweeping down across from a city street after a raucous celebration in the 1950s, evokes Gregory Crewdson with its elaborate sets and epic cinematic scale. The tone is distinctly nostalgic—Prager took great pains to shoot the glow of the vintage neon signs just right—with coiffed bobs and briefcases. Her subjects look like they might burst out into song at any moment. They journey from town square to bus stop to sock hop, skipping through confetti that, somehow, still rains from above, long after the party is over.
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