Pulp ReviewPhoto

Ihave been taking some photos recently. I know you all have been, too. If we could all open our cloud photo albums at once we might all be able to experience the whole world all in its endless detail and unity. To me, the world is constantly screaming for reproduction. To be captured, to be seen again, to be shared amongst us. I feel compelled to reproduce and collect the ways that things so often come into perfect alignment inside the frame of the camera app.

Robert Smithson wrote in 1971, “... cameras have a life of their own. Cameras care nothing about cults or isms. They are indifferent mechanical eyes, ready to devour anything in sight.”1 In many ways, maybe we have become more like the camera; walking around with the phone perpendicular to our face, hungry for more images for our endless collections. With the camera app open it merely becomes another layer in the composition we create before our eyes. Maybe we have created Smithson’s “Infinite camera” » which he posits as being somewhere between the still and movie camera.

If the phone is an infinite camera it has come to have its own character. It is the balance between clarity (the still image) and compression (the endless image) that creates this look. It is a perfect camera for taking many pictures, the perfect camera for reproduction. Mobile phones possess ultrawide lenses that push away the background and bring the focus of the image directly into the centre of the frame. We are selectors, following the whims of a device that would “shoot” the whole world if it could.

In my thinking about photography, an idea I am trying to understand is this way in which our collective unconsciousness seems to converge onto a discernable feature of photography. Not on the locus of subject, or a style, or a “look” but rather the process that defines the images that are produced. If analog photography is characterised by an inherent instability owing to its complicated and fragile chemical process, what is so unique about phone photography is its seamlessness, its automatism and the way picture taking has honed in on everyday marvellousness.

These images demand to be read for their graphic power. I ask that you sit with each one for a moment longer than it would’ve taken for it to be photographed in the first place.

love, S.

Notes.

1. Robert Smithson. Art through the Camera’s Eye, 1971