Shot on iPhone

A photograph taken on a phone, on the sides of buildings around the world.

In early 2016 Apple relaunched its Shot on iPhone campaign for the iPhone 6s. None of it was commissioned. Apple’s team went looking through photographs that ordinary people had already published online, chose a small set, and put them on billboards, buildings and magazine pages worldwide.

One of the images was Douglas Sandquist’s — a lone figure standing in the mouth of an ice cave beneath Vatnajökull in Iceland, taken on an iPhone 6s and posted to Instagram with the caption “The glow from deep inside an Ice Cave.” It had forty-four likes.

The original Instagram post of the ice cave photograph

The original post, before Apple saw it.

Where It Ran

Credited only as by Douglas S., the photograph went up on a tower in Los Angeles, a newsstand kiosk on Market Street in San Francisco, a rooftop in Seoul, a billboard at Roppongi Hills in Tokyo, building wraps in Mexico and China — and on the back of Entertainment Weekly and The Weekend Australian Magazine.

The photograph on a tower in Los Angeles — Los Angeles

The photograph on a newsstand kiosk in San Francisco — Market Street, San Francisco

The photograph on a billboard at Roppongi Hills, Tokyo — Roppongi Hills, Tokyo

The photograph on a rooftop billboard in Tokyo — Tokyo

The photograph on a rooftop billboard in Seoul — Seoul

The photograph on a billboard above First Avenue — First Avenue, Minneapolis — the club Prince made famous

The photograph on a building in China — China

The photograph wrapped around a building in Mexico — Mexico

The photograph on a billboard in Mexico — Mexico

Douglas Sandquist beneath the billboard in Los Angeles — Los Angeles — the photographer, for scale

Douglas Sandquist in front of the Los Angeles tower — Los Angeles

The photograph on the back cover of Entertainment Weekly — *Entertainment Weekly*, Comic-Con issue, 2016

The photograph on the back cover of The Weekend Australian Magazine — *The Weekend Australian Magazine*, July 2016

The Print

The photograph is available as Sublime Glacier, produced the same way as every print here: a Lumachrome exposure on metallic photographic paper, face-mounted beneath acrylic, signed and numbered in a limited run.

See Sublime Glacier

A second frame from the same morning in the same cave is available as Inside the Glacier.