belikeotherpeople

britticisms:

It has become a predictable formula for a photograph: reckless youth, beautiful girls, wild parties, hipster fashion and vague nostalgia, all illuminated with bright flash and hazy light. Spontaneity captured by a subcultural insider and ultimately eliciting our envy of a lifestyle, which, if the camera tells the truth, is more fearless, more exciting and more poignant than ours will ever be. 

Leah Turner’s essay in C magazine on the aesthetics and, more importantly, the semiotics of Tim Barber’s (and Ryan McGinley’s and Terry Richardson’s) photographs is an important one. If not important, it is certainly relevant and something that reflects a visual that continues to fester on the internet.

I am reminded of the culture of tumblr, the images that constantly pop up on the screen and the proliferation of said images. In general, they are still blurry and beautiful snapshots of the young, the white white, the thin and abled. But speaking beyond the obvious physical characteristics of the subjects of the images, what always struck me was the exploitation of an aesthetic, and the underlying sense of self satisfaction that runs through every scene. Turner writes, “the photographer has that particular ability to mediate the everyday, and transform it into the marvelous.” 

And it is marvelous! They are marvelous and interesting and subsequently beautiful, simply because they are seemingly existing and doing so in a manner that is riveting. The images also exists in a manner that achieves two purposes: to be both familiar and unknown. I recognize that they are having a good time or getting into trouble or living with a sense of spontaneity, but they also “have” lives that I don’t possess or recognize as similar to my own or my friends’ or even the casual acquaintances I know only through parties and openings. Does anyone own those lives? Turner writes:

“The deliberate blurring of autobiography and fiction often leads to compelling art, but when it comes to snapshot aesthetic photography of this nature, the acknowledgement of fiction instead leaves one feeling cheated.”

And: “Why might a savvy viewer of contemporary photography in all its various pictorial constructions respond this way, without raising the antiquated motion of the camera’s objectivity? It suggests that we may want to believe in the fantasy. Part of the joy that comes from looking at this genre of photography comes from our belief in it, howevernaïve that may be, as an example of a more extraordinary way to live.”

I remember livejournal, high school, and a blog I followed by a young man in Canada who worked by day (and rarely spoke of this), but who was beautiful and enigmatic and surrounded by friends who were much the same. It was different and exciting to track his existence in places that were full of “exciting” people, doing the sort of things I romanticized at sixteen. I remember their faces in the way that I usually remember photography of this sort: blank but amusing. And in my home in the suburbs, in my days of honors classes and dance practices and note taking, I could go home, turn on my computer, and be reminded that there was another world out there, one that was exciting and full of activities that took on an air of glamour. It was an aspirational and hopeful experience. 

And there was a sense of freedom that I craved beyond just leaving home for more school. And there was a sense of freedom that I craved because it was a freedom I could not find, a freedom to exist without the narratives of my class, my gender, my ethnicity.

This photographic aesthetic became ubiquitous. It was no longer a new “thing” in reaction to the growth of the internet, but a means of exploiting an idea about one’s life and using it to gain admiration among the potential eyes viewing one’s work around the world. The images appeared more and more alike, either in reflection of the time passed since I saw my first photo set, or in relation to the glut of visual cues: soft lighting, thin white bodies, natural and wooded scenery or curated urban desecration, alcohol and weed and pills. It all became similar, and because it was similar, it was no longer vital.

I no longer praised the ideas I created (and the photographer created) about the images. I am less resentful and more bored. At 22, I can say that this will never be my life. It bothers me as much as I spend time thinking about the images, which is in fists and bursts, sporadically. The narrative no longer matters. Or, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve quickly realized that the narrative no longer exists, perhaps never existed, and that if it does exist, the story being told is one I’ve heard for the past decade, from numerous people in numerous settings. There is a gleam in their eye that makes me doubtful, even if their stories are true. Everything that mattered, happened, I think. Eventually the debauchery is just fantasy. 

There’s a terrible contradiction on my feelings about these pictures. I love them and I hate them. There are so many of them taken by so many different people, all aiming for this one narrow aesthetic, homogenised and dulled to almost to indifference as they are by sheer volume, yet sometimes I love them. Sometimes I wish I was there in their world, being recklessly youthful instead of serious or inert. But I hate them, because how could anybody bear to knowingly join that narrative, making beautiful pictures which were only the same as so many others, which would only be judged as a whole, instead of in their own right, as an original piece of thought and skill. It would kill me to do that, yet if I’m not paying attention, that’s almost exactly what I start to do. And I want to shout at everyone who likes them, why do you like them, why are you suckered in by them, why don’t you like what you like instead of what everyone else does, why is it so important to feel like you’re part of this group? And of course I know exactly why.