I’m going to get patronizing and paternalistic for a minute… yes, I mean more so than usual. Because I wish some of you crazy bitches could unilaterally reassess your relationship with photography.
Still photography is one of the most unnatural, inhuman inventions in civilization’s robust portfolio. Human bodies aren’t designed to be frozen in time and analyzed in minute detail; we’re all just unseemly, fleshy facades over a rickety scaffold, and only in motion do most of us come alive.
Now, the fact is that there are a tiny number of people in this world who look naturally at home when folded into the harsh little dimensions of a photo, and a substantially larger pool of others who have learned to seem at home where they are not. And if we all looked at what they create and said to ourselves “wow, what amazing talent,” shit would be grand.
But that’s not what happens. We instead conflate “taking a pretty picture” with “being pretty”, even though every fucking one of us has seen that screencap of Beyoncé at the Super Bowl, and thus have conclusive proof that even one of the most attractive women on Earth is fully capable of looking like a tendon-y nightmare-troll when her physicality is deprived of its flow and context. It isn’t Photoshop that distorts reality; it’s the camera itself.
Which is not a flaw in the technology, of course; it does something awe-inspiring in making art out of moments. But that’s what it always is: art, a constructed truth, a cleverly selected slice of life.
Nothing more.
