/PoorImages

In defense of poor images Hito Steyer

The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.

A lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution

The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction.

digital era the image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty

The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming.

The poor image is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image. Its genealogy is dubious. Its filenames are deliberately misspelled. It often defies patrimony, national culture, or indeed copyright. as a reminder of its former visual self.

one even doubts whether it could be called an image at all. PUSHES THE LIMITS OF THE IMAGE DEFINITION

Only digital technology could produce such a dilapidated image in the first place

poor images are the debris of audiovisual production, the trash that washes up on the digital economies’ shore

They testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images—their acceleration and circulation within the vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism.

Poor images show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable—that is, if we can still manage to decipher it.

1-low resolutions

Woody Allen Movie,an actor with a disease, his image is consistently blurred he cant find work Focus is identified as a class position, a position of ease and privilege, while being out of focus lowers one’s value as an image.

The contemporary hierarchy of images, however, is not only based on sharpness, but also and primarily on resolution.

CINEMA IS becoming a flagship store that markets image in an up-scale environment.More affordable derivatives of the same images circulate as DVDs, on broadcast television or online, as poor images.

In some way, the economy of poor images corresponds to the description of imperfect cinema, while the description of perfect cinema represents rather the concept of cinema as a flagship store. But the real and contemporary imperfect cinema is also much more ambivalent and affective than Espinosa had anticipated. On the one hand, the economy of poor images, with its immediate possibility of worldwide distribution and its ethics of remix and appropriation, enables the participation of a much larger group of producers than ever before. But this does not mean that these opportunities are only used for progressive ends. Hate speech, spam, and other rubbish make their way through digital connections as well. Digital communication has also become one of the most contested markets—a zone that has long been subjected to an ongoing original accumulation and to massive (and, to a certain extent, successful) attempts at privatization.

Obviously, a high-resolution image looks more brilliant and impressive, more mimetic and magic, more scary and seductive than a poor one. It is more rich, so to speak.

RICH IMAGE AND CAPITALISM AND FETISHISM The insistence upon analog film as the sole medium of visual importance resounded throughout discourses on cinema, almost regardless of their ideological inflection. It never mattered that these high-end economies of film production were (and still are) firmly anchored in systems of national culture, capitalist studio production, the cult of mostly male genius, and the original version, and thus are often conservative in their very structure. Resolution was fetishized.