Think about this: Terry Richardson using a cheap P&S for his fashion work. Stephen Gill using a found, scratched up, cheap, plastic P&S to produce Hackney Wick. David Alan Harvey using Leica, Fuji, iPhone amongst others to produce (Based on) a True Story. Olivia Arthur using photos of photos in her work about women in Saudi Arabia. Stephen Shore using a cheap P&S in his early work.
You're using examples of people who are using crappy gear for certain artistic effects. Whether or not you like their art from, the fact that they use poor quality cameras for art has nothing at all to do with this discussion. And you're mixing in people who use high end gear too, so I really don't see your point.
I'm sure you can find a lot of "professional" photographers who work with Holgas. The fact that they find huge success with those images in the art world doesn't mean they take a decent picture, and your examples are completely irrelevant to this thread.
The fact is the majority of iPhone camera users are taking instragram selfles and facebook snapshots, and don't know the difference between a lens and a filter. (Or a filer and a photo editing program for that matter). iPhone camera users have nothing at all to do with photographers and never will.
For every person who buys a Ferrari, thousands buy a Honda Civic. It doesn't mean a Civic will ever give you the same performance as a Ferrari, and why should Honda even care? No matter how many people want a car for puttering around the city, there will still be a market for people who want a performance sports car and will pay the price for it.
McDonalds will never have a shortage of customers. Neither will five star restaurants.
There is a growing community of instagrammers producing fantastic work with cell phones. Some are becoming commercially successful.
Good for them. There's also more pictures of cats taken by iPhones on the internet than there are paintings in all the museums in the world. I'm not sure how that's relevant to this thread, but it's no less so than your comment.
You look at iPhone snapshots run through instagram filters. I'll continue to get my inspiration from modelmayhem and photo.net, and even here with people like needfx. I'm sure all those "professional photographers" you reference with their basic cameras have a concept in mind for their photos and go to exquisite trouble to realize their concepts.
You're now comparing a quick selfie with an instagram filter to a crafted image which starts with a design concept, make-up artists and hair stylists. Carefully constructed lighting setups. Precise posing, even using wooden figure study models to help pose a person. Paying attention to every strand of hair, every finger. And then there's hours of post production work which is not a 1-click filter.
And you think someone with that much passion putting that many hours of work into a shot is going to take the actual exposure with an iPhone. That's just laughable. With all that work, you want to be content with a web image? For me 13x19 is a "standard" print, and a lot of people have told me I think too small for saying that.
Personally, when I see a great photo I just think wow! What a great picture. What equipment was used, grain, noise, DR, etc doesn't enter my mind. Sometimes there is a story behind the picture, like the guy reporting on the Libyan revolution whose DSLR broke so he switched to his iPhone. That just makes me think hey, great work.
And when I see a great photo, I think about how it was taken. Where the light sources are, the camera angle, how the subjects were arranged and set up. How it was cropped. What post-production was involved.
And again, you reference some guy who took photos with his iPhone when his DSLR broke. What does that have to do with this thread which is about whether iPhones can ever replace DSLRs and all that they bring to an image. Do you think because some guy can use his iPhone in a pinch it's good enough for everyone?
