Hito Steyerl - Defense of the Poor Image

Hito Steyerl - In Defense of the Poor Image

The poor image is a visual communication once held privately and pristinely in the cinema has now become public, distorted, compressed, uncertain (quality becomes accesibility)

It contains both the promise of digital technology and the failings

The content of poor images is secondary to the message they convey, where they imply how the image has been consumed and re-gurgitated

Within the image, a class system hierarchy exists – where the sharpest, highest resolution and image purity are seen as primary. The hegemony of 35mm film dominates as the supreme format.

The commodification of culture insisted visual media become a highly specialised field monopolised to private distribution networks where it could be controlled by financial means, experimental images became super obscure and fringe, until the advent of internet culture where the radical forms of the image became 'poor' and highly distributed.

Poor images exist outside the class structure, their resemblance implies their status. As former states dissolve, so do the apparatus of state cinema. Conversely neo-liberal states enforce the distribution of the historical cinema in a highly monetized manner.