Several Layers Of Nostalgia Are At Play With These Images [old Polaroids]: Not Just For The 1980s Style

« Several layers of nostalgia are at play with these images [old Polaroids]: not just for the 1980s style on display—the gelled hair, the jean jackets, the oversize T-shirts—but for a time before the internet and phones, before everyone could carry a camera and instantly distribute the images. Sometimes this manifests directly in the images’ content, when someone is talking on a corded phone or listening to a boombox or sitting in a bedroom whose walls are covered with pictures cut out of magazines. You can see how everyday life was saturated with analog media, which makes the relative absence of screens palpable.

But pre-digitality also comes across as a nostalgia for the technology of print photography itself. Its limitations now read as stylistic choices, particularly since they have become filter options for us in contemporary camera apps. In the old photos, the fading colors, the flashbulb glare, the imperfect focus, the chemical blotches and anomalies from the developing process can seem at once both accidental and deliberate, or as accomplishing the deliberate capture of the incidental.

Looking at images like these—a kid sleeping in the back of a Ford Escort; a woman in a bathing suit sitting on a lawn chair in the driveway smoking a cigarette, a guy with a mullet in an apartment complex living room crouched beside a tower of Carling Black Label cans—I’m tempted to romanticize that mystery as a kind of grace that enchants the people in them, who don’t know yet that they are living in the before. None of the images are selfies, which feels strange in itself. The subjects usually know that they are being watched, […] but they can’t imagine, even in theory, that it could be everyone watching. They can’t even frame that as an aspiration, which, to me looking back on them now, seems to animate their behavior with a guileless innocence, an indifference, an aura they’re unaware of, an absence of self-consciousness that I could trace in their faces, though I am certainly projecting it.

An illusion arises that in these snapshots people are somehow more present, more themselves, as though the camera were capturing something more elemental about them because they had less wherewithal to stage the image or manipulate it after the fact. It is as though who they were in general was more fixed and objective, less fluid and discursive. Though they are anonymous, they register more concretely as specific people, unpatterned by the grammar of gestures and looks that posting images to networks seems to impose. [N]ot every image of them will be taken to define them or will be seen as expressing something they were trying to say. The photos appear not as assertions of reality but reality as it was. This is all tantamount to a nostalgia for denotation, for a time when images were less rhetorical, less overtly intentional […].

A photographer once could make an occurrence into an occasion by recording it. Accordingly, one can be nostalgic for the way film cameras could sanctify mundane experience, rather than making experience seem mundane. Cameras are ubiquitous now; they can no longer be added deliberately to a situation. All of [the above] has been displaced by the ability to send things to the network. No longer is it magic to represent and preserve, but to circulate, to influence and tally up the proof of it. Photos that document “reality” as it was are necessarily trapped in a drawer somewhere or in an album buried in an attic. Photos that document intentionality are everywhere and nowhere, disappearing into the way we see everything. »

— Rob Horning, “Found images: On the nostalgia for image scarcity”

PLUMBER!

NFTs are a scam

I think we're definitely getting to the point with Dracula daily where some (most) people need to be reminded it is a historical novel, and is going to have prejudices in it. that doesn't meant dont read it, its important to read these classic stories that have been so warped by time and pop culture! it just means you should be keeping an eye out for the biases that are present, be critical of what you're reading, make note of what stereotypes the text is applying to minority groups and how that might affect them

FUCKN LOVE MERMAY 

also love the waterhouse that this is referencing

a steve n bucky for mermay

You heard the man, folks.

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