blue gate

Some thoughts here from Teju Cole, writing in his book of essays Known and Strange Things, from an essay on Gueorgui Pinkhassov. Cole has also recently produced a book called Blind Spot, a beautiful combination of words and photographs. Both are well worth getting hold of.

“380 billion photos were taken in 2011, and about 10 percent of all the photographs currently in existence were taken in 2012. Amateurs with Canon cameras and overpriced L lenses have something to do with this; even more culpable is the incessant and overwhelming production of camera-Phone images by huge numbers of people.

There are good reasons to be suspicious of this flood of images. What is the fate of art in the age of metastasised mechanical reproduction? These are cheap images; they are in fact less than cheap, for each image costs almost nothing. Photo processing is easy and rampant: beautiful light is added after the fact,depth of field is manipulated, nostalgia is drizzled on in unctuous tints of orange and green. The result is briefly beguiling to the senses but ultimately annoying to the soul.

But the problem with the new social photography isn’t merely about photo processing: after all , photographers have always manipulated their images in the darkroom. The filters that Hipstamatic and Instagram provide, the argument goes, are simply modern day alternatives to the dodging and burning that have always been integral to making photographs. This argument is partially true. But the rise of social photography means that we are now seeing images all the time, millions of them, billions, many of which are manipulated with the same easy algorithms, the same tiresome vignetting, the same dark green wash. I remember the thrill I felt the first few timesI saw Hipstamatic images, and I shot a few myself, buoyed by that thrill. The problem is not that images are being altered—it’s that they are being altered in the same way: high contrasts, dewy focus, oversaturation, a skewing of the RGB curve in fairly predictable ways. Correspondingly the range of subjects is also peculiarly narrow: pets, pretty girlfriends, sunsets, lunch. In other words, the photographic function, which should properly be the domain of the eye and the mind, is being outsourced to the camera and to an algorithm.

All bad photos are alike, but each good photograph is good in its own way. The bad photos have found their apotheosis on social media, where everybody is a photographer and where we have to suffer through each other’s “photography” the way our forbears suffered through recitations of terrible poetry after dinner. Behind this dispiriting stream of of empty images is what Russians call poshlost: fake emotion, unearned nostalgia. According to Nabokov, poshlost “ is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.” He knows us too well.
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I don’t wish to begrudge anyone his or her pleasure: it’s no bad thing that everyone is now a photographer. We can be the curators of our lives, and can record every banal moment if we wish. And indeed, why not?Nevertheless, in looking at a great photographic image from the past or the present, we know when blood is drawn. We know that some images, regardless of medium, still have the power to enliven us. And we know that these images are few. Not all 380 billion images a year, not 1 billion of them, not 100 million, not one million....”