G̶o̶o̶d̶ Impactful Photography
Pausing Our Endless Scroll
The average American allegedly takes anywhere from six to twenty photos every day. There are trillions of photos in existence. Two sentences into writing this text, I took a break to scroll through a few hundred more – all on my phone. I want to consider myself a “thoughtful” late millennial curator who stops to smell the metaphorical (photographic) roses, but when I’m honest with myself, it’s often a blur.
In this ocean and digital sandstorm of real, manipulated, crowd-sourced, user-generated, and increasingly artificially intelligence’d images, how can a photo have impact? In our flood of memes, ads, live-streamed, hyper-scrolled-through violence, doom, joy, catastrophe, eyes salty and glazing over, what does it take to make a mark?
When Humble first launched as monthly, unthemed, “550 pixels on the long side,” online group shows back in 2005, we often described our mission as a quest for “photos that make us blink or twitch.” To this day, I am optimistic about photography’s potential to help us pause and reflect. This pause, twenty years later, was the crux of Float and Humble’s collaborative call.
What follows on these pages is a volley between impact as “pow! pow! pow!” and impact that takes a softer approach. Subtlety can be as attention-halting as loudness. Starting with immediacy, Jenna Garrett’s cover image shows two sets of fingers holding an eye open, forcing us to look at someone being forced to look. It hits you right away. It’s disconcerting. While knowing the context of the photos’ larger series expands its meaning infinitely, it works just as well on its own.
And then, there’s Nick Drain’s black and white photo of a covered fruit tree. Soaked in gentle sunlight, it quietly basks in emotion and metaphor. As I write this, the image is a small piece of a developing project that Nick says “isn’t concrete enough to share yet,” and maybe doesn’t need to. While I eagerly anticipate the series’ evolution, it doesn’t change the image’s delicate power.
We invite you to put down your phone and have a look.
(text by Jon Feinstein)
Selected Artists / Patricia McElroy, Gabriela Hasbun, James Mazey, Sydney Krantz, Jo Ann Chaus, Jenna Garrett, Arielle Bobb-Willis, Daniel George, Daniel John Bracken, Aline Smithson, Adam Birkan, Chris Adams, Judi Iranyi, Alvaro Munoz, Nick Drain, Xuan Feng, Cinzia Laliscia, Melinda Hurst Frye, Alex Franklin, Ruben Natal-San Miguel, Ryan del Rosario, Buku Sarkar, Filippo Barbero, Jennifer Baron, Maria Siorba, Hannah Altman, Angela Crosti, Emma Kisiel, Granville Carroll, Keavy Handley-Byrne, Aaron Drummer, Jeremy Starn, Mathis Benestebe, Emma Backer, Rachel Demy, Laidric Stevenson, Deanne Sokolin, Leslie Gleim, Jiahong Wang, Oleg Leynov, Quincey Spagnoletti, Yadira Hernández-Picó, Nicholas Dantzer, Seth Adam Cook, Rich-Joseph Facun, Alayna Pernell, Vann Thomas Powell, Anton Bou, Pia Paulina Guilmoth, Maggie Lu, Lisa Beard, Carolyn Monastra, Laura Noel, Joaquín Palting, Kris Graves, Janelle Lynch, Jennifer Georgescu, Constance Thalken, Cameron Gutierrez, Melissa Grace Kreider,
Riley Goodman, Michael Young, Georgia Matsamaki, Martin Venezky, Guillermo Franco, Janay Bookhart, Alexa Mazzarello, Jody Servon, Jesse Ly, Montanna Binder, Stacy Arezou Mehrfar, Joshua Mokry, Jacqueline Schlossman, Justin Hamel, Marc Verbeek, Lidewij Mulder, Michael George, Peter Chu, KevinB Jones, Leah DeVun, Emily Buckley, Kody Zenger, Teeratada Jungpol, Susan Rosenberg Jones, Vladimir Seleznev, Tony Dahlgren, Cristina Scalabrini, Bettina Stammen, Auston Marek, Luigi Maruani, Odelia Toder, Twyla Sampaco, Yiding Chen, Troy Colby, Olivia Harrison, Jesse Egner, Jane Waggoner Deschner, Lynne Breitfeller, Jieyu Deng, Anna Laza, Thierry Borcy, Shawna Gibbs, Yorgos Efthymiadis, Elie Ranu, Sanwal Deen, William Mark Sommer, Theodor Petruna, Stephan Jahanshahi
