Is something missing from your perfectly exposed photos? Do you remember when photographs used to have some character to them? Go climb up in your attic and dust off that box of photos from your childhood. Go ahead, I’ll wait…

So what did you find? Stunning clarity? Perfect exposure? What was the megapixel count? No, your box of memories was perfectly flawed. The colors have faded, the edges are worn, and the gloss is long gone. But these are the images we cherish. In fact, the images we love the most are often the most abused. Because those are the ones we carried around in our wallets. We tacked them up on our walls. We pressed them between the pages of our books. They survived the coffee spills, the fires, the years of direct sunlight. And all that abuse, all that destructive attention, it didn’t ruin our pictures. It made them better somehow. These are the photos that transcended technology and became artifacts of our past. I miss that, don’t you?

Instagrunge re-introduces the damage that the last 20 years of photographic “advancements” has tried so hard to eliminate from our pictures. Sure, the camera in your phone is amazing. State of the art. But don’t you wish you could push them a bit. Touch them. Leave your fingerprints on them. The curse of digital is that it puts a barrier between us and our images. It is easier than ever to create images, but it has never been harder to connect with them.

Yes, I suppose it is just an illusion, an effect. It can’t compete with the brutal reality that physical prints deliver. You still end up with a reproducible  jpg ready for posting on your favorite photo sharing site. But there is something liberating about grungifying your photos. It’s therapeutic somehow. There aren’t too many photos that can’t be improved by a little destruction. And that’s what Instagrunge provides.

But the app isn’t quite finished yet, so you will have to wait a little longer before you can start dirtying up your images. Stay tuned…