> In fact, many teens are going out of their way to make their photos look worse. Huji Cam, which make your images look as if they were taken with an old-school throwaway camera, has been downloaded more than 16 million times. “Adding grain to your photos is a big thing now,” says Sonia Uppal, a 20-year-old college student. “People are trying to seem candid. People post a lot of mirror selfies and photos of them lounging around.”

What I find interesting is that "making your photos look worse" isn't new at all: it's the foundation of the "vintage" vibe that filters have been emulating since the beginning. So what's actually new here is the kind of imperfections being introduced.

It makes sense: as media capture reaches maximum fidelity, creative expression increasingly involves the purposeful choice of infidelities. Imperfection has always had a place in art, but usually it involves failing to avoid a natural mistake; for modern digital media, on the other hand, it's about subtracting from perfection rather than failing to reach it.

EDIT: Thinking about this further, it's possible that I'm focusing on the wrong thing... perhaps the dominating factor is nostalgia, which just happens to involve "imperfections" in this case because the target of the nostalgia is a medium (photography) which has been undergoing an improvement in fidelity. For all I know, perhaps one day the dominating aesthetic will be driven by nostalgia for "boring" filter-free high-fidelity images!