Slow Imagery
PHOTOGRAPHY SHARING AS A SELF-CONTAINED AESTHETIC PRACTICE
Keywords:
Design, Form, Instagram, Modernism, TimeAbstract
In Documentum, a guest-curated newsprint periodical archiving and examining photography on Instagram, photography sharing is described as “the cultural ephemera of our time”. While this consideration holds true, it also relates to a common understanding of social media as a somewhat frivolous form of creative output. Focussing beyond the casual and the notational, “slow imagery” identifies in the cultural ephemera of Instagram an influential range of photographic dispositions denotative of an intent to convey an idealised depictive fidelity of things. As if primarily made for the social media stream, these are designed photographs, whose ways of seeing pursue atemporal renditions of the lifeworld, and ultimately constitute an actualisation of celebrated modernist affirmations of photography as a self-contained aesthetic practice. Framed as part of a historical continuum, the slippage of the photographer’s status to that of illustrator of a creative brief provides a sound basis for addressing the contemporary emergence of modernist inspired formalist dispositions toward picture-making on a networked medium such as Instagram. This development represents a renewed medium specific flight from history, whose elusive spatiotemporal appeal arises from an interdisciplinary convergence of interests in the shaping of the photographic image, but also from the awareness of having a mass dissemination medium and an audience apparently favourable to the visual simplicity of the modernist pictorial syntax on display. As Irving Penn expressed with great clarity in the symposium “What is Modern Photography?” held at The Museum of Modern Art in 1950, “the modern photographer is very conscious of the time element in the viewing of his work. (...) In consideration of this time element, the modern photographer has learned the economy of means of a graphic artist.”
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