The Road to Banal

The more photographs I see, the less photographs I like.

greed

There are too many photographs, too many photographers. That’s not really a bad thing, nor a good thing. It’s just an inevitable thing. The democratization of photography, at first via compact film cameras, then by digital, and now by phone cameras, has redefined everything: how we take pictures, who takes them, why we take them, and what the photograph means to us as a cultural object.

pride

Everybody can take impressive pictures now. Image quality that once was achievable only by a few is now achievable by anybody. It has a desensitizing effect: the extraordinary becomes the banal.

lust

Some restless souls rebel and rejoice instead in low-fidelity photography, using toy cameras or digital post-processing to add some willful negligence to their pictures. Pretty soon you can get an app to do it for you, and then suddenly you can get a hundred apps.   And thus the exceptional becomes banal too.

envy

Everything becomes banal, if there’s enough of it. And we have far more than enough photographs.   If you buy a book of the great photographs of say 1875 to 1975, very few of them have the impact today that they had in their own time.  It’s because there are now thousands – even millions – of photographs that are just as impressive, at least at first glance (and first glance is all we have the time for: it's first and last, alas).

sloth

With literature it’s precisely the opposite:  lately there is almost none that stands comparison with the best of what went before.  While photos are now an indispensable part of everyone's social networking persona, writing (and reading) are optional extras at best.

gluttony

This collection of photographs tries to reveal and record things that were not visible to the eye, but that also were not added after the event. 

Some sort of transcendental documentary, I suppose.

wrath