THE PHOTOGRAPHIC EYE & THE AGEING OF IMAGES

i spend a lot of time thinking about images and how they age: how their significance changes, and how things can appear or come to light in an image over the course of time, despite it being a still, unchanged frame. i really believe that the photographic eye is the closest thing we can reach to the supernatural: a trained eye changes the world in front of you, in a sense it unlocks a new dimension, a world that most don’t see. the world looks different, and different things call your attention. the photographer composes and photographs these subjects and by doing so, suddenly pulls this scene back into the common world where others can collectively marvel at this moment, wondering how they walked past it without noticing its significance. now sometimes this process can happen almost instantly; the photographer makes an image, and others, having seen the image, scratch their head thinking what great attention to detail this person must have to have spotted that, ‘I would’ve never thought to photograph that, but now I see it in the image, I share that marvel with you’. Other times, this process unfolds over years, decades. Time and time again, as mentioned in ‘Bilder für Mama’, my reference for this is Stephen Shore, a photographer whose images constantly make me shake my head in disbelief. I remain in awe for the sheer skill to have been so far ahead of the world in what he sees, that I really believe him to be a time-traveller. I think to myself how could anyone have been so attentive to life at the time, to see things that would take others 50 years to see. How is it that some can see things that others don’t. This is what I mean when I say how it feels like it borders on being supernatural; it genuinely seems like a superpower. This is why I love photography.

Shore first showed his series, American Surfaces, in 1972. It was a series of I believe 300 or so images, taken on a small consumer camera, one far below the standard of what photographers would have preferred for their professional work. The images showed everyday scenes of America and were presented on small postcard sized prints, exactly the type that a typical drugstore would’ve handed back to you if you took your family vacation images for processing; in fact I think he really did process and print these at a run of the mill drugstore. Point being, that these images were presented in the most informal, and widespread manner possible at the time. The exhibition in ‘72 was met with confusion, criticism and as per the internet ‘severe public rejection’. 50 years on, the series is hailed as one of the greatest of its time, having seen three major editions since its original release, numerous reprints, MoMA retrospectives, and is generally considered one of the cornerstones of 20th century art. It took 27 years for it to reach its first official publiciation. 27 years for it to slowly dawn on people what Shore was seeing. The images hadn’t changed, but as Shore says it, people find it easier to look at the past than the present.

Shore continued this conceptual lineage with a series of iPhone images shared on instagram from 2014 up until 2024 that in the same way as American Surfaces, used the current tool of the everyman, the iPhone, along with the medium or platform of the everyman- instagram (70s equivalent being drugstore prints). I had a very interesting conversation today with someone near and dear to me about the weight or value of iPhone images and whether simple everyday snapshots of a photographer can have more ‘artistic merit’ or ‘value’, than those of let’s say an instagram mum taking the same snapshots of her everyday life that end up being indistinguishable. I think it comes down to intention. When I first came across Shore’s work on instagram a few years ago, having at this point only known his large format work, I was confused and probably a bit disappointed too. I didn’t understand how someone who had managed to climb the ranks as a photographer, establishing himself as one of the greatest of our time, could take such uninteresting and generally amateurish-seeming photographs. The type of images that at first seem like those your mother would post on instagram. What happened? How do you go from incredible 8x10 work to this? What am I missing here? A couple curiosity-driven revisits to this instagram series and I established that I was just not ready for this work yet. Though admittedly, it gripped me. It gripped me because I knew there was more to it- there had to have been. You don’t just lose skill like this and from hearing him speak in interviews, and hearing him talk about his work, I knew he was no fool.

Having later discovered and fallen in love with the series i mentioned previously American Surfaces, and read about its initial reception, I realised that I myself had become the donkey who wanted to reject this body of work because I struggled to look at the present myself. Just like those people visiting the exhibition in the 70s leaving confused and not knowing what exactly to do with this work I had just seen, I had rejected the instagram series because I was unable to look past the fog of familiarity. Shore was one step ahead again.

Since then, with projects like ‘Bilder für Mama’ and generally working on developing my eye, I’ve made peace with the series, realising that he’s doing the exact same thing he did in the 70s, just that this time I was able to see this process unfold in real time, in front of my eyes. This is the new reality, and most are blind to it. Give it 50 years and chances are we will end up in the same position again, there’s no reason for this cycle to end. Life will look different soon, microwaves will look different, cars will look different, fashion will change, hairstyles, interior decoration, architecture, roads etc etc and suddenly when the fog of familiarity clears, we see the images for what they really are.

I feel myself learning to disregard medium, and instead get comfortable with the tool that screams ‘i am not art’. I try to constantly wake myself up, refusing to be sucked into the apparent banality of everyday life because I now know that it only lasts for a set period. As photographers we have to be able to look past it and work through it. Staying aware, and not being afraid of mistakes. All this work on the iPhone only benefits my work with other photographic mediums: the skill is the same. A good picture is a good picture.

Today I managed to articulate a thought for the first time related to the choice of mediums we have today. Much like O’Doherty argues in his book ‘inside the white cube’ that art galleries themselves are highly charged spaces, celluloid film as a medium seems to have accumulated a reputation for possessing a similar capacity to elevate something to ‘art’. now that is not to say that any image taken on film becomes something worth looking at, quite the opposite actually, but it’s undeniable that together with its texture, grain etc it’s seen as something special in today’s world of digital images. the interesting part though I find is that the iphone as a medium tends to have the opposite force. it carries a stigma that pulls work down to the level of being unserious, casual and not worthy of real artistic merit. however i must say, i think the fun comes in proving yourself across all mediums. the photographic eye is naturally a transferable skill but i would be of the opinion that progressing through the photographic practice from the beginning is important. navigating the exposure triangle, mechanical cameras, traditional film processing etc, in order to understand the craft from all angles.

Having finished ‘Bilder für Mama’, a retrospectively assembled series serving as an exercise in breaking down preconceptions of the iPhone as a medium, the natural progression becomes a collection of everyday iphone images, very informal yet with clear intention, and this time assembled as i go rather than retrospectively . I have photography to thank for much of my perceived ‘purpose’ within this world, and my images represent my marvel of the world upon taking a step back, all with the consciousness that nothing is forever and everything we know will change eventually. i feel my purpose is to forage this world for moments, subjects, scenes that this distance reveals to me as being significant, to subsequently photograph and present my fascination with what others may have missed; people may choose to join me in this fascination or not.