Pixel Perfect
Seeking the real in a smooth world
Author’s note: Hey you! Yeah, you. Are you new here and like photography? If yes to both, then I thought I’d plug my other Substack account — Memories of Geographies — here. It’s the home of my photographic practice these days and you should check it out and maybe subscribe if you’re into it!
I’ve been trying to break from my “stay up late on the computer” cycle by reading once it gets past a particular hour. But there was a night last week when it felt like literature was just a bit above my pay grade. So, I did something I hadn’t done in a while — dusted off some photo books to engage with instead. My choices were the two William Eggleston books I have — 2 ¼ and Portraits. These are books I got at least 10 years ago now and probably haven’t opened in close to that. Back around 2013-2015, I was first getting into the New Topographics movement of the ‘70s while still being heavily invested in straight-up street photography thanks to Vivian Maier and Garry Winogrand. Those few years were transitionary, and by the end of it, I was fully aping Stephen Shore. And, to a lesser degree, Eggleston.
A lot’s happened since then. I tried my hand at Canadian Surfaces then gave up on photography in 2020 only to rekindle my love for it earlier this year. I’ve always been a photographer, though, even when I haven’t been. I generally say that I started photography in 2009, when I got my first DSLR, and went down the rabbit hole of ISO, shutter, aperture, and exposure. But I’ve been photographing for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, I would waste my dad’s film on camping trips experimenting with strange compositions and Dutch angles. As a preteen and early adolescent, I’d get his camera hand-me-downs whenever he upgraded and was the person who brought film to birthday parties before all the girlies were doing it at the club with their Coolpixes. And my “retired photographer’s era,” circa 2020-2023 is perhaps better described as my iPhone era. Because I was still snapping away, almost reflexively, just without the baggage of fame, projects, and shutter speeds.
The thing is that even though I was never technically retired from photography, in my mind I was. Which meant disengaging from any consumption of news, discourse, history, or knowledge. So now, in the Year of our Lord 2023, I’m looking at Eggleston from a very different perspective from when I first got inspired by him. And, like, that’s normal — it’s been a decade — but I wasn’t exactly loving what I was taking note of.
The biggest takeaway I had when looking at Eggleston was the imperfections. When people were the subject, I noticed wrinkles, lines, hairs out of place, shirts dishevelled, and unflattering angles. When inanimates were the subject, I fixated on how the subject would be slightly off-centre, or the horizon may be kind of crooked, or the central focus wasn’t tack sharp, or prominent figures with cut-off appendages.
Why was this the thing my mind cared about? I know I can be a little too Wes Anderson when it comes to symmetry and perfect compositions, but I think it goes beyond that. Like so much of my cultural criticism as of late, it goes back to Instagram. The platform has fed us an oversaturation of images while requiring our participation in that system for social capital. And because, as we know, social media is just a popularity contest dictated by ethereal algorithms, it prioritizes a specific kind of imagery to win. It’s how we got a generation of girls' backs with their arms reaching behind them to an unknown boyfriend photographer off-screen.
Also, I never used to be that Wes Anderson about compositions. If anything, I was moderately sloppy in the past. I think this was symptomatic of street photography itself, which lends itself to a certain kind of carefree, anything-goes style. I started considering composition more seriously as I shifted from candids to human-altered landscapes a la New Topographics. I don’t think it’s inherently wrong to care about composition and strive for a certain level of quality, either. It’s how we get results as photographers (in part). The issue I’m noticing in my observations is that the pendulum has swung too far from the carefreeness I used to exhibit.
The 2010s were arguably the stills era of the Internet, after the text era of the ‘90s and 2000s, preceding the video era we’re currently in. The one-two punch of good-enough smartphones equipped with a front-facing camera and the rise of mobile visual apps like Instagram to complement those phones helped cement the era’s ethos. This inevitably produced a deluge of images that we were now responsible for consuming and adding to. I don’t know about you, but seeing so many images so often can be overstimulating and also make me fixate less on the feeling or subject matter and more on the technical elements, as every feeling collapses into a blur as my eyes glaze over. By doing so, I started to seek a certain compositional standard that revels in perfectly spaced objects, ideal symmetry, and so on.
Couple this with the governing ideology of a place like Instagram, where you need images that succeed in the social game we’ve all been indoctrinated to play, and it can bring out a kind of perfectionism in anybody. Perfectionism is rewarded on Instagram. Everything needs to be ideally staged, with the correct lighting, the preferred orientation (vertical1), and, because it’s all about making ourselves a brand, the right subject matter: ourselves (with or without other beautiful people) befitting a particular vibe (it’s a vibes-based economy) we’ve latched onto. It’s all so calculated and artificial. But even when we focus beyond our navels for subject matter on the ‘gram, everything must be “aesthetic” and conform to a standard of beauty. You need to brag without seeming to and instead appear aspirational in some way. Because, at the end of the day, if you go to Europe and don’t post about it, did you even go to Europe? And these posts need to be frequent, where every day is perfect, lest the algorithms punish us by not sharing us with enough of our followers to the extent we don’t get as many likes and our sense of worth plummets. Literally, babes wake up new publish-or-perish just dropped.
I first began noticing my body dysmorphia in 2018. It’s not like I’d never been self-conscious about my body or felt low self-esteem before. But this was something else. I would see images of my face or my body and look at them obsessively until my brain started to construct imperfections that I’d hyperfixate on. This crept up in 2018 because that was the year I started taking selfies to a higher degree than ever before. You know what it’s like to repeat the same word over and over in your head until it loses all meaning and you start focusing more on the way it sounds and how strange that might be? That’s how my body dysmorphia feels, except swap a word for your visage.
It’s exhausting, too. I’m deeply aware of how absurd it is to obsess over some minor perceived flaw, and was back then too. I didn’t want to waste hours thinking in these cycles — I had other things to do! Often there wasn’t anything actually wrong about how I looked, but it was like my brain was inventing ways to hate myself from an oversaturation of images. We didn’t evolve to be able to readily access so many images of ourselves and compare them to images of others and it fucks with our brain chemistry. So, I’d be disgusted with myself because of the way a shadow cast on my face made it look like I had an asymmetrical beard or was annoyed with how I had some hairs sticking out or my shirt bunched in one little area instead of being smooth.
Smoothness is where this algorithmically-dictated framework has led us. No time for cracks or wrinkles or blemishes or imperfections, on our skin, clothes, hair, anywhere. This is only possible because the toxic, addictive style of Instagram smooths the wrinkles in our brains, atomizing and atrophying with every extra moment spent there. Why have we accepted a need for studio-level perfection in our everyday photographs?
The toxicity that comes from perfection is a big part of why I’ve stopped posting my photos on Instagram and done what nobody else is brave enough to do: dump photo essays on a platform of writers. And with this shift, I’ve noticed some improvements. Back on Instagram, whenever I would post something, I’d obsessively refresh the page to get the dope hit from likes and comments. The grid also makes it easy to look back, either in thumbnails or by clicking the post effortlessly. I’m sure this ease of access is useful in some ways, but for me, this just saturated my brain with the same images until my brain began melting. I stopped seeing the images for what they were and more for constructed issues and imperfections. Sometimes, I’d feel so bad about how a photo looked that I’d embarrassingly delete and repost it with a new edit.
But Substack doesn’t let me indulge these neuroses so easily. I still have my qualms with this platform, but even if I obsessively refresh to see the numbers rise after posting, it’s on a webpage completely removed from the actual blog. Because my photo essays are a large dump of photos, aside from the one thumbnail image, I can’t obsessively look at every single image until I’m numb. And I very deliberately never have a thumbnail image of myself, because that’s just a recipe for disaster. On the off chance that I do notice something wrong with a photo now, this platform at least lets me go back and edit a post in a way Instagram won’t.
However, there still is one image on here that works like Instagram has. It’s the image of myself I’ve used for my profile this year. Taken by my dad at the brass nirvana of the Fantasyland staircase, it was taken in the winter, back when I was getting back into using my Fujis. The photo was part of a test for the one last piece of whether or not I could fully abandon using my phone for photography again. The test was — I kid you not — whether I liked the way I looked on Fujifilm or not. I know that might sound narcissistic, but bear with me. It’d been years since I’d really been photographed with something like a “real” camera and I’ve long had the feeling that I look best in low resolution. Believe it or not, I was quite happy with how the photo came out. I’d directed my dad on how to frame it, and the composition is solid. My expression is good. My hair is well-coiffed. And to top it all off, I’m showcasing my favourite sweater. Mixed with the retro staircase, the photo evokes a real ‘80s vibe, enhanced by Fuji’s film-like colour profiles.
This photo was such a rare example of a photo of myself that I actually liked. It didn’t look off and I didn’t feel ugly. So, it naturally felt like a great choice for a profile pic, as it was seemingly immune to my scathing self-criticism. And yet, as I’m writing this post, I’m obsessing over it. I realize the photo has crossed over and I’ve seen it one too many times as my brain is fixating on superficial “problems” with it. It took a while, but it finally happened. Why can’t I just have this little win for my self-esteem? A photo’s never going to be 100% flawless, anyway.
I’ve been thinking a bit about Pamela Anderson lately. She recently caused a bit of a frenzy for her no-makeup looks at Paris Fashion Week. Jamie Lee Curtis called it “an act of courage and rebellion.” She’s right. Pamela is doing something subversive, in her way, against the expectations of women to succumb to the eternal chase of youth and the unrealistic beauty standards to which many of us have found ourselves subject. As Pamela: A Love Story director Ryan White described her:
Nothing is contrived or premeditated or calculated in any way [with Pamela]. It’s how she’s feeling at the moment. And I think that’s so rare today. There’s really no one like her anymore because it’s hard to be like that where you’re not calculating a move or thinking about your followers, but Pamela, for whatever reason, romanticizes that individualism — but it’s not phony; it’s real.2
If you don’t care about this stuff or have never felt these pressures, maybe it seems a bit silly. I know I’m not a woman, but I’m acutely aware of beauty standards and how they impact me, regardless. Instagram is, depending on how you interact with it, arguably one giant conduit for cementing beauty standards. There’s a standard to always being well-dressed, having great skin (including no-makeup makeup for women), a good physique, a fresh cut, and on and on and it’s so exhausting to perform for the algorithm in these ways just for some mindless validation. But we feel bad about ourselves if we don’t perform properly anyway, so it’s a trap. In 2021, Pamela herself addressed her fans on Instagram by saying she was quitting social media. She told them she “[hopes they] find the strength and inspiration to follow [their] purpose and try not to be seduced by wasted time.”3
Thinking back to Eggleston, it’s interesting how a well-regarded artist produced an iconic body of work that has influenced pop culture icons like Sofia Coppola while doing the thing that Instagram punishes: imperfection. I pine for a time when I didn’t care about this stuff either, and instead enjoyed the wondrous colours and expressiveness Eggleston gave us. And I’m actively working on getting there, but I know it isn’t an easy journey. Regarding that ‘80s-esque profile portrait, I’ve wound up in a familiar coping mechanism — I will look up photos of other people where the same imperfection is present to assure myself that I’m fine and it’s ok to look a particular way. I don’t hyperfixate nearly as much and these episodes don’t happen very often, but they still do, and they’re exhausting because I know what’s causing it is all so bullshit.
I realize we live in a world where nothing feels authentic anymore and even seeking it out feels futile, but I nevertheless crave it. Fundamentally, chasing these algorithmically-dictated standards, fixating on perfection, only gives me very brief joy when achieved, until the next impossibility mounts and I go into crisis mode yet again. I don’t want smoothness — I want wrinkles and blemishes and imperfections, both photographically and personally. At least ideologically, because aesthetically I’m so conditioned towards smoothness that reality can still be a bit off-putting. We aren’t used to seeing frown lines or women who look their age anymore in media and it’s fucked with our sense of humanity. But I know from my experiments this year, at trying to be more present and authentically me, that being real does bring contentedness and peace, even if I’m still not good at it. Which is probably why everyone was raving about how glowing Pam looked sans makeup in Paris. Right now, I’m fighting the urge to waste time editing my profile photo to try and fix the imperfection so that I can calm my brain down, however fleetingly. I know that it’s just a band-aid rather than doing the real work of addressing and working to ameliorate the root problem. I hope this side of me, the one that is striving for the real, which includes imperfections, wins out.
Writing this has led me to think back to my childhood. There wasn’t a lot of money and so until my dad went digital in 2003, every photograph was taken on this dinky, No Name 35mm point-and-shoot that couldn’t focus on anything closer than a meter away if its life depended on it. This left a lot of moments where someone would be kind of out of focus. The first 10 years of my life were documented with this limited machine and although in the past I’ve wished that we had something better to document these moments, I’ve come to appreciate the inherent imperfections of this tool. The photos may not be great, but that doesn’t matter. They’re still memories, and the imperfections reflect the life I lived back then. That’s what we miss when we chase smoothness and perfection. We miss ourselves.
Maybe it’s worth mentioning that perfectionism in photography isn’t anything new. I’ve also recently revisited Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places, the New Topographics magnum opus. Shore’s compositions feel sharper and more regulated than Eggleston’s. I do think that the former’s impression on me is why until fairly recently I’ve strove for the least amount of parallax distortion and the sharpest, most rigidly straight lines in human-altered landscapes. But even still, when I looked closer, I still saw the same imperfections I saw in Eggleston. And honestly, those imperfections are all good because they’re real, rather than feeding an unattainable standard. Making things uber-perfect nowadays is symptomatic of how easy it is to alter photos in the digital age, too. Even still, Shore’s photos are beautiful analogue babes and Uncommon Places may be one of my all-time favourite photo books. I do think, these days, Wimberly Wenderson is my preferred New Topo guy, though.
Through my “retired” era, I found that my compositional prowess continued to improve via the phone, and the fruits of that bear out in my latest work on Fujis. I like these results, if I’m being honest. I look back on my 2010s photography and wonder what I was thinking sometimes with the compositions. This is somewhat ironic because I also romanticize how careless I was with these sorts of things then. I ultimately think, like so many things, nuance and attempting a middle ground is key. It’s good to care, but not too much, because things become cold and superficial, like your typical influencer’s imagery. Hopefully, my endeavours in this arena pan out and I can attain that medium in my work, both for my sanity as well as the creative results.
I’ve got this idea around the rise and prioritization of vertical photography and how it feels like photographic armageddon. Perhaps I’ll let it rattle around some more and see if an essay pops out of it.
Got this quote by reading Shut Up Evan. And you should too.
https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/pamela-anderson-quits-social-media-claims-its-mind-control/