With the advent of visual technology in modern life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the transmission of visual information has undergone a technological revolution – from the developments of the digital fax machine to mobile camera phones. The latter specifically became the pinnacle of a technology that made the production of photographic material an everyday activity, accessible to a wider scope of the population. Bolstered by the rise of social media and microblogging in the early 2000s on websites such as Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, the role of the image as the main source of information positioned itself firmly within modern life. Posted, sent, screenshotted, compressed and downloaded, the image constituted a digital copy of reality, one that bypassed the subjective limits of geography, chronology, and fallibility of the human eye. Walter Benjamin, in his 1936 seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility, contrasted manual reproduction with technologically bound reproduction, such as through gramophone recording, photography or film, arguing that it is precisely the latter that penetrates deeply into the tissue of reality, corrupting the aura of the original object or moment.
A photograph of a painting, a ballet performance or a musical concert could be captured by the advanced lens of the camera, often surpassing the fallibility of the human eye, through its ability to enlarge and produce a precise yet sterile copy of the object or moment. One copy could then be quickly turned into a swirling mass of images in prints, magazines and cinema, further destroying the uniqueness and authority of the original work – its aura. Perpetuated by the democratisation of art and culture, and by the masses’ striving to “get closer” to things – whether by making public the frescoes decorating a king’s private chambers or by observing the dancers at arm’s length – technological reproduction ensured a new kind of universal access. Yet, it is with this access that the authenticity of the work began to cease, as it is taken out of and detached from its original context – its unique time, place, and ‘ritualistic’ quality. And as Benjamin noted, ‘art consequently becomes based not on ritual but on politics’ – display, circulation, and propaganda.
It is from within this ‘Benjaminian’ framework that Hito Steyerl’s concept of the poor image emerges. First published in her 2009 essay “In Defence of the Poor Image,” the concept describes the degraded, low-resolution image as both a symptom of capitalist systems of visual circulation and a by-product of democratic access, online sharing and everyday use. By being compressed through continuous downloads, screenshotting, reformatting and redistribution, the image loses its resolution. Steyerl argues that the latter is not a neutral technological factor but a form of hierarchical distinction. It is high-resolution images that occupy the privileged position of the “rich image,” associated with cinema, official archives, expensive technologies and ‘institutional’ values. Poor images, by contrast, circulate as downgraded derivatives as compressed files, ripped videos, thumbnails, screenshots, and unstable copies. However, as the title of the work In Defence of the Poor Image suggests, Steyerl sees their low resolution not only as a marker of their exclusion but also as a precondition of their mobility. Central to her argument is the framing of the poor image as a sort of underground resurrection of the disappeared works and ideas. In losing quality, they don’t necessarily lose their aura. Its circulation allows excluded images to be seen, copied and edited by users who, in turn, become its critics, translators, and co-authors – ultimately rendering a visual assemblage of pixels into a reflection of shared experience and reality itself. So, while Benjamin’s mechanically reproduced artwork loses its aura through copying and mass circulation, Steyerl’s poor image reveals that technological reproduction does not produce a perfect or neutral copy of reality; instead, it creates images whose damaged pixelated surfaces register the very processes of circulation that make them visible.
Nevertheless, it is important to note that Steyerl never forgets to acknowledge the image’s fundamental role as an entertainer that remains embedded within capitalist systems of attention, distraction, exploitation and commodification. The masses’ inherent need for access and familiarity with the same information produces so-called ‘visual bonds.’ Employing this collocation from cinematographer Dziga Vertov’s theory of using certain cinematic visual cues evocative of the proletariat, Steyerl suggests that seemingly democratised access becomes a grassroots means of organising and even orchestrating low-resolution content, akin to capitalist techniques of commodity fetishism. One can think about it in terms of contemporary online culture. As mentioned at the beginning, the rise of various online platforms in the early 2000s allowed for active image circulation, whose consequent low resolution was not simply a reflection of the user’s hasty reality but stood as a symbol of a new shared style. In other words, what was a technological fallibility – the reduction of quality due to continuous visual reformatting and transference from one platform to another became an aesthetic. This can try to explain why low-quality imagery has become especially prominent in Gen Z visual culture. Users with expensive iPhones equipped with numerous advanced cameras and software that retain almost the full quality of an image, find themselves posting blurry photo dumps that include pictures from old cameras, compressed memes, screenshots, and awkward flash images that are not only ‘so to speak’ personal stylistic choices but are unconscious signs of participation in a shared online visual language.
Perhaps, then, the poor image points to the online performativity of modern society itself. In Walter Benjamin’s thinking, technological reproduction once weakened the aura of the original, yet Hito Steyerl’s essay shows how, through circulation, the poor image can create a new aura of its own. However, in contemporary online culture, especially among Gen Z, such visual degradation is employed to suggest anti-“official” capitalist aesthetics. Thus, what was once a by-product of technological transfer becomes an aesthetic of online presence. Blurry and careless-looking images suggest authenticity, certain intimacy, and resistance to polished outlooks, but they also reveal how deeply even casualness is shaped by capitalism’s demand for visibility.
Edited by Isabel Hume
Cover image: Addison Rae performing in Paris from her instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/DZTYtMgD-UO/?hl=en&img_index=7
Paper Galleries 
Leave a comment