In Defense of the Poor Image

by Hito Steyerl

"The poor image is no longer about the real thing—the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation.

In short: it is about reality."

Genres: Art, Essays, Nonfiction, Theory, Philosophy, Film, School

9 pages, ebook

Published January 1, 2009

About the author

Hito Steyerl (sometimes spelled Štajerl) is a German filmmaker, visual artist, and author in the field of essayist documentary video. Her principal topics of interest are media, technology, and the global circulation of images. Steyerl holds a Ph.D in Philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is currently a professor of New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Arts.

Reviews

[caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this essay when i first read it, and love it even more with the extra 2021 layer of NFTs.
Steyerl says: "the dematerialized art object turns out to be perfectly adapted to the semioticization of capital, and thus to the conceptual turn of capitalism," which couldn't apply more to the further radicalization of "culture as commodity" we see with NFTs and this growing desire of ownership over the poor image.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

What would Hito Steyerl say about NFTs lol

[sofi lira s · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Las imágenes pobres muestran lo extraordinario, lo obvio y lo increíble, siempre y cuando seamos todavía capaces de descifrarlo."

"Las imágenes pobres son pobres porque están muy comprimidas y viajan rápidamente. Pierden materia y ganan velocidad. Pero también expresan una condición de desmaterialización, que comparten no solo con el legado del arte conceptual sino sobre todo con los modos contemporáneos de producción semiótica."

Ojalá pudiese escribir tan bien.
Gracias clase de Historia de la Imagen por invitarme a leer cosas tan bellas y tan inteligentes

[Michel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The vulgar crowd always is taken by appearances, and the world consists chiefly of the vulgar.

[drill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me when i’m called to arms in defense of the poor image https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FAhN5BbVU...

[Úrsula · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hito ets increïble. La teva associació de classes amb les imatges. La teva manera de reivindicar la imatge amateur i la pirateria. M'he quedat amb genes de saber dels pirates-fans....Visionària abans d'una pandèmia.

[catherine ♡ · Rating 4 out of 5]

memes

[Eleanor Kaminski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gonna go fetishize some low res images

[Fai Ahmed · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.
The poor image is a rag or a rip;an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletariat in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited.
It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction. The image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digi- tal uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends toward abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming."

[Haodong · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The circulation of poor images thus creates “visual bonds,” as Dziga Vertov once called them. This “visual bond” was, according to Vertov, supposed to link the workers of the world with each other. He imagined a sort of communist, visual, Adamic language that could not only inform or entertain, but also organize its viewers. In a sense, his dream has come true, if mostly under the rule of a global information capitalism whose audiences are linked almost in a physical sense by mutual excitement, affective attunement, and anxiety.”

[Janice Chung · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not one who reads essays, but after reading Lisa Lowe's “Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization: Asian American Critique” for English class, I realized how insightful essays are. I probably wouldn't have thought much of poor images, but this essay brings a new perspective. Here's my favorite excerpt,

"The history of conceptual art describes this dematerialization of the art object first as a resistant move against the fetish value of visibility. Then, however, the dematerialized art object turns out to be perfectly adapted to the semioticization of capital, and thus to the conceptual turn of capitalism."

This took me a while to digest, but it's a really interesting insight about how poor images are paradoxical. I feel like I can never look at low-resolution, distorted images the same way lol.

[amber]

i wasn't expecting essays that aren't book-length to be on here, so i haven't really logged any that i've read, but this is here, so why not log it. anyway, i finally read this highly cited article after trying for years; we repairing our attention spans with this one! shout out all the deep-fried memes on my phone and laptop. shout out ubuweb, youtube (in very specific cases), dailymotion (also in very specific cases), vimeo (also also in very specific cases).

(very interesting to think of the poor image as an object that shows its history visually. with each screenshot, download, upload, rip, whatever, you get visual artifacts or you lose visual data. plus the metadata that follows it.)

[Guilherme Santos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interessante para interpretar em nosso mundo digital sobre como o compartilhamento em massa de imagens, a pirataria e o armazenamento de mídias na internet é em geral como uma forma de democratizar a mesma. Mesmo deformada pelo tempo de sua reutilização, ela ainda existe e é vista, revista, editada e difundida até que se torne algo totalmente diferente de sua premissa original. Não é algo bom nem ruim, apenas é.

[Anton Løkke Laursen · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Poor images are poor because they are not assigned any value within the class society of images - their status as illicit or degraded grants them exemption from its criteria. Their lack of resolution attests to their appropriation and displacement."

[Alexandre Mury · Rating 5 out of 5]

Steyerl’s exploration of low-resolution image circulation is fascinating. In my work, 'Theory as Poor Image,' I extend this idea to critical texts, examining how they circulate in algorithmic environments and become machine-readable. It opens new questions about the circulation of knowledge today.

[Sanaa · Rating 4 out of 5]

surprisingly moving??? why did I get emotional about an essay on pictures

[Emerson Foster · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful

[clavelito · Rating 5 out of 5]

leido nosecuantas veces ya desde el 2017

[wjejehejjwje]

Vamos

[Goldfinch Bolton · Rating 5 out of 5]

kinda foundational for the last 20 years

[Casey Browne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Relevant when thinking of 2000-2010, where image format was something to get past, progressing towards futures of high resolution and cloud-based storage networks