This text is a adaptation of Hito Steyerl’s In Defense of the Poor Image in the style of Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces:
The Poor image, its low-resolution, its pixelation. What is it to us? A frame, a boundary, a membrane between the image and its dissolution. A copy of a copy. Lost data, stripped layers, colours fading into nothing. And yet, somehow, it lives. It brings forth its messaging and shares with the viewer the rawness.
There are images we see, and there are images of the images we see, each layer adding noise, subtracting sharpness, blurring, changing. And yet they travel, unhindered by their deterioration. They move across the internet, finding new places to settle, new screens to glow on, and in their persistence, they become something else—a relic, an artefact of their own decay.
High-definition images—these are images that demand a certain space, a certain screen, a certain fidelity. They proclaim permanence. They claim a “place.” But the poor image has no such pretensions. It does not occupy; it wanders. It migrates across the global network like a nomad. The focus of an image is a status marker, the sharp akin-to-life look of it denotes to us its quality, it marks itself as a higher social standing. Being out of focus islowers one’s value as an image.
The lower quality image is regarded as second best, lingering in our lives as a lesser being, yet it persists and shines. We share it despite its flaws, we engage it for what it really is. Some may opt to remove themselves from the lessen image, to imagine instead of engaging with lower quality. The poor image persists, as a way of reassuring us that nothing can silence our culture, even in its deteriorated quality.
Each image is a memory, faint but enduring. Each image is a shared space, bridging disparate rooms, screens, places. Its poverty is its resilience. It resists, not by defying time, but by moving with it, changing with it.