10 ms·
> In fact, many teens are going out of their way to make their photos look worse. Huji Cam, which make your images look as if they were taken with an old-school
by md224 7y ago
> In fact, many teens are going out of their way to make their photos look worse. Huji Cam, which make your images look as if they were taken with an old-school throwaway camera, has been downloaded more than 16 million times. “Adding grain to your photos is a big thing now,” says Sonia Uppal, a 20-year-old college student. “People are trying to seem candid. People post a lot of mirror selfies and photos of them lounging around.”
What I find interesting is that "making your photos look worse" isn't new at all: it's the foundation of the "vintage" vibe that filters have been emulating since the beginning. So what's actually new here is the kind of imperfections being introduced.
It makes sense: as media capture reaches maximum fidelity, creative expression increasingly involves the purposeful choice of infidelities. Imperfection has always had a place in art, but usually it involves failing to avoid a natural mistake; for modern digital media, on the other hand, it's about subtracting from perfection rather than failing to reach it.
EDIT: Thinking about this further, it's possible that I'm focusing on the wrong thing... perhaps the dominating factor is nostalgia, which just happens to involve "imperfections" in this case because the target of the nostalgia is a medium (photography) which has been undergoing an improvement in fidelity. For all I know, perhaps one day the dominating aesthetic will be driven by nostalgia for "boring" filter-free high-fidelity images!
- blattimwind 7y ago> Imperfection has always had a place in art, but usually it involves failing to correct a natural mistake The question in art is more along the lines of whether you actually want to reproduce, or if you want to interpret. For the vast majority of all history this was fairly firmly on the "interpret" side of things.
- organsnyder 7y agoEven reproduction involves a fair amount of interpretation. The same camera will yield very different results depending on the skills and priorities of its user. Framing is especially important.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- burtonator 7y agoI take my selfies with a Camera Obscura. You've probably never heard of it.
- cageface 7y agoThis kind of thing goes back at least as far as Rousseau and seems to go in cycles. I think we're overdue for a new Kurt Cobain to come along and make guitars cool again.
- mikepurvis 7y agoPopular music had its moment like this in the sixties, with albums like Sgt. Peppers— suddenly all that activity in the studio became less about reproduction, and about creating _a_ production. The final audio that was listened to by consumers was not something that had ever been performed and might not even be performable. All that filtering and multi-tracking might or might not constitute inserting "imperfections", but it's definitely creating something well above and beyond what was actually played live in front of a condenser mic. Nowadays we take all this for granted, when even rom-coms go through extensive computer work for colour correction to change the time of day, and other digital additions/removals. But I think at the time it was a big deal.
- asaph 7y agoAre you insinuating that The Beatles' Sgt. Peppers is anything short of perfection?
- mikepurvis 7y agoHaha, of course not. But it's relevant that the last Beatles tour was in summer 1966, and that album came out in May 1967. The Beatles were fed up with stadium acoustics and screaming fans and whatever else, but definitely a part of it was simply the reality that Sgt. Peppers could not be performed live with the technology available at the time. It's interesting to see how modern artists like Moby tackle this issue— basically they create their music at a computer, and then later on hire a bunch of musicians and figure out how to perform it on tour.
- asaph 7y agoMy understanding was that the decision was made to quit touring because they were exhausted by it, not because there were some constraints on what they could record such that it could be reproduced live. But once the live show was a non-factor, it freed the band from that onerous constraint and opened up the possibility of the more densely layered multitrack recording and overdubbing. The result: a record that sounded nothing like anything before it and elevated pop music to a true art form. Some years later, Queen would take the multitrack recording and overdubbing to a further extreme with Bohemian Rhapsody, which they actually did perform live, albeit with the help of recordings.
- che_shirecat 7y agocase in point: the resurgent popularity of lo-fi hip hop, which heavily uses harmonic distortions and phonographic imperfections as a sort of mood/atmosphere setter
- lone_haxx0r 7y agoPlot twist: Instagram makes all pictures look like crap by limiting their resolution.
- warent 7y agoI think you hit the nail on the head with the purposeful choice of infidelities. It goes beyond photography too. For example, I like producing electronic music as a hobby, and one of my favorite VSTs is RC-20 Retro Color (https://www.xlnaudio.com/products/addictive_fx/effect/rc-20_retro_color https://www.xlnaudio.com/products/addictive_fx/effect/rc-20_...) which intentionally adds tape noise, wobble, flutter, and dropouts; things that audio engineers painstakingly labored over avoiding and removing only a couple of decades ago. Yesterday's distortions and imperfections are today's character and color.
- Noos 7y agoNot nostalgia I think, but a search for texture and warmth. Digital media has a very glossy, smooth, and cool look to it. How ever that feels very mannered and sterile. Imperfections like grain evoke a sense of texture to works that add interest, and noise in general is considered warm. I think people find more comfort and authenticity in those things. I think if you look at most modernist architecture, you have a real life version of the digital look; you have the glossy, cool, and smooth aesthetic, but they have sort of an anti-human vibe to them. It might be that the influencers are just tired of the mannered look and the implications of it.
- atoav 7y agoInterestingly enough this is not necessarily a inherent quality of digitally reproduced media, also photochemical film tried extremely hard to look as flawless as possible. And a lot was possible. It took colorists a lot of effort to get those colors out to look just right, similarily you could grade a movie shot on a 100k$ Arri Alexa rig to look just like old Eastman or Kodak stock. But when you do, people won't preceive it as digital anymore. The grain however is the most important thing. What it does for me is it adds a certain distance to the thing happening. It is a constant reminder that you are looking onto a surface and not into a window. Maybe it is also about emotional distance to remind yourself: "it is just a image".
- rangibaby 7y agoI think technical people have a bad habit of conflating fidelity with quality. There are many Hollywood tent poles that are no where near as interesting or fun as “Who Killed Captain Alex?” https://youtu.be/KEoGrbKAyKE https://youtu.be/KEoGrbKAyKE
- divbzero 7y ago> It makes sense: as media capture reaches maximum fidelity, creative expression increasingly involves the purposeful choice of infidelities. This reflects what occurred in European art from the 1850s through the turn of the century: paintings becoming less “pixel perfect” as Realism [1] gave way first to Impressionism [2] and then to Expressionism [3]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realism_(arts) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realism_(arts) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressionism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressionism [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressionism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressionism
- louhike 7y agoThe rise of impressionism and expressionism was because of photography actually. Photographs took the role of painters to reproduce perfectly reality.
- tnolet 7y agoI take a slight issue with initial description of Realism in the wiki article. Realism was much more grounded in depicting real life, real people, instead of kings and wars and Jesus etc. It was much more of a socio political statement than just "painting things as life like as possible". The paintings were still very staged and stylized. (I have an MA in Art History which really helps centering Div's with CSS)
- karlerss 7y agoI'm surprised that the article nor comments mention Lomography. When Instagram came along, the Lomography aesthetic was a major influence. I guess it goes in cycles. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lomography https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lomography
- afro88 7y agoBasically this, but applied to visual medium: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/649039-whatever-you-now-find-weird-ugly-uncomfortable-and-nasty-about https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/649039-whatever-you-now-fin...
- arkh 7y ago> It makes sense: as media capture reaches maximum fidelity, creative expression increasingly involves the purposeful choice of infidelities. Same thing with mass produced vs man-made products.
- atoav 7y agoI worked in over 10 films as a camera guy/DOP. I think what grain can really do, is to give you the feeling you are looking ONTO a picture rather than INTO a world. They might not know it, but by using this aesthetics, they say: look at the picture of me, rather than "look at my world". Nostalghia might be a factor for sure, but the driving factor is materiality. Many of us grew up in a very material world, this included film and photography. Everybody tried their best to make the media invisible (get rid of vinyl crackle, tape saturation/noise, colour shifts of badly treated optochemical films, glitches in maladjusted VHS heads, etc.) Today it is the polar opposite. Because the digital image can be so perfect, young people feel the urge to give it materiality, they add vinyl crackle to their music, they imitate the mistakes of old technology to make what they do something you look ONTO rather than INTO.
- sizzle 7y agoThis was a very profound perspective, thanks for sharing from your film experience.
- ChrisRR 7y agoI'd argue that the vintage filters are why Instragram became popular in the first place. The internet wasn't short of places to share your pics at the time.
- weak_learner 7y agoThis reminds me of a quote by Brian Eno: "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them."
- tabtab 7y agoRe: going out of their way to make their photos look worse... make your images look as if they were taken with an old-school throwaway camera... It's comparable to torn jeans. My mom would say, "We spent a lot of effort to keep our clothes clean and tear-free, and now you guys pre-tear them."