In Defense of the Poor Image Hito Steyerl The poor image is a copy in motion. Its Poor images are the contemporary quality is bad, its resolution substandard. Wretched of the Screen, the debris of As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost audiovisual production, the trash that wash- of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an es up on the digital economies’ shores. errant idea, an itinerant image distributed They testify to the violent dislocation, trans- for free, squeezed through slow digital ferrals, and displacement of images – their connections, compressed, reproduced, acceleration and circulation within the ripped, remixed, as well as copied and vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism. pasted into other channels of distribution. Poor images are dragged around the globe as commodities or their effigies, as gifts The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or or as bounty. They spread pleasure or death a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class threats, conspiracy theories or bootlegs, society of appearances, ranked and valued resistance or stultification. Poor images according to its resolution. The poor image show the rare, the obvious, and the unbe- has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, lievable – that is, if we can still manage reformatted, and re-edited. It transforms to decipher it. quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contempla- tion into distraction. The image is liberated 1 from the vaults of cinemas and archives and Low Resolutions thrust into digital uncertainty, at the ex- pense of its own substance. The poor image In one of Woody Allen’s films the main tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea character is out of focus.1 It’s not a techni- in its very becoming. cal problem but some sort of disease that has befallen him: his image is consistently The poor image is an illicit fifth-generation blurred. Since Allen’s character is an actor, bastard of an original image. Its genealogy this becomes a major problem: he is unable is dubious. Its filenames are deliberately to find work. His lack of definition turns into misspelled. It often defies patrimony, na- a material problem. Focus is identified as tional culture, or indeed copyright. It is a class position, a position of ease and privi- passed on as a lure, a decoy, an index, or lege, while being out of focus lowers one’s as a reminder of its former visual self. It value as an image. mocks the promises of digital technology. Not only is it often degraded to the point of The contemporary hierarchy of images, being just a hurried blur, one even doubts however, is not only based on sharpness, whether it could be called an image at all. but also and primarily on resolution. Just Only digital technology could produce such a dilapidated image in the first place. 1 Woody Allen (dir.), Deconstructing Harry. 1997 1 / 9 Shoveling pirated DVDs in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, China, April 20, 2008. look at any electronics store and this sys- anchored in systems of national culture, tem, described by Harun Farocki in a no- capitalist studio production, the cult of table 2007 interview, becomes immediately mostly male genius, and the original ver- apparent.2 In the class society of images, sion, and thus are often conservative in their cinema takes on the role of a flagship store. very structure. Resolution was fetishized In flagship stores high-end products are as if its lack amounted to castration of the marketed in an upscale environment. More author. The cult of film gauge dominated affordable derivatives of the same images even independent film production. The rich circulate as DVDs, on broadcast television image established its own set of hierarchies, or online, as poor images. with new technologies offering more and more possibilities to creatively degrade it. Obviously, a high-resolution image looks more brilliant and impressive, more mimetic and magic, more scary and seductive than a 2 poor one. It is more rich, so to speak. Now, Resurrection (as Poor Images) even consumer formats are increasingly adapting to the tastes of cineastes and But insisting on rich images also had more esthetes, who insisted on 35mm film as a serious consequences. A speaker at a guarantee of pristine visuality. The insis- recent conference on the film-essay refused tence upon analog film as the sole medium to show clips from a piece by Humphrey of visual importance resounded throughout Jennings because no proper film projection discourses on cinema, almost regardless was available. Although there was at the of their ideological inflection. It never mat- speaker’s disposal a perfectly standard DVD tered that these high-end economies of player and video projector, the audience was film production were (and still are) firmly left to imagine what those images might have looked like. In this case the invisibility 2 “Wer Gemälde wirklich sehen will, geht ja schließlich of the image was more or less voluntary Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, auch ins Museum,” and based on aesthetic premises. But it June 14, 2007. Conversation between Harun Farocki and Alexander Horwath. has a much more general equivalent 2 / 9 Nine 35mm film frames from Stan Brakhage’s Existence is Song, 1987. based on the consequences of neoliberal connected to the restructuring of global policies. Twenty or even thirty years ago, media industries and the establishment the neoliberal restructuring of media of monopolies over the audiovisual in cer- production began slowly obscuring non- tain countries or territories. In this way, commercial imagery, to the point where resistant or non-conformist visual matter experimental and essayistic cinema became disappeared from the surface into an under- almost invisible. As it became prohibitively ground of alternative archives and collec- expensive to keep these works circulat- tions, kept alive only by a network of ing in cinemas, so were they also deemed committed organizations and individuals, too marginal to be broadcast on television. who would circulate bootlegged VHS copies Thus they slowly disappeared not just from amongst themselves. Sources for these cinemas, but from the public sphere as were extremely rare – tapes moved from well. Video essays and experimental films hand to hand, depending on word of mouth, remained for the most part unseen save for within circles of friends and colleagues. some rare screenings in metropolitan film With the possibility to stream video online, museums or film clubs, projected in their this condition started to dramatically original resolution before disappearing change. An increasing number of rare again into the darkness of the archive. materials reappeared on publicly accessible platforms, some of them carefully curated This development was of course connected (Ubuweb) and some just a pile of stuff to the neoliberal radicalization of the (YouTube). concept of culture as commodity, to the commercialization of cinema, its dispersion At present, there are at least twenty tor- into multiplexes, and the marginalization rents of Chris Marker’s film-essays available of independent filmmaking. It was also online. If you want a retrospective, you can 3 / 9 have it. But the economy of poor images also has to do with the post-socialist and is about more than just downloads: you postcolonial restructuring of nation states, can keep the files, watch them again, their cultures, and their archives. While even re-edit or improve them if you think some nation states are dismantled or fall it necessary. And the results circulate. apart, new cultures and traditions are Blurred AVI files of half-forgotten master- invented and new histories created. pieces are exchanged on semi-secret P2P This obviously also affects film archives platforms. Clandestine cell-phone videos – in many cases, a whole heritage of film smuggled out of museums are broadcast prints is left without its supporting frame- on YouTube. DVDs of artists’ viewing copies work of national culture. As I once observed are bartered.3 Many works of avant-garde, in the case of a film museum in Sarajevo, essayistic, and non-commercial cinema the national archive can find its next life have been resurrected as poor images. in the form of a video-rental store.6 Pirate Whether they like it or not. copies seep out of such archives through disorganized privatization. On the other hand, even the British Library sells off its 3 contents online at astronomical prices. Privatization and Piracy As Kodwo Eshun has noted, poor images That rare prints of militant, experimental, circulate partly in the void left by state-cine- and classical works of cinema as well as ma organizations who find it too difficult video art reappear as poor images is signifi- to operate as a 16 / 35mm archive or to cant on another level. Their situation reveals maintain any kind of distribution infrastruc- much more than the content or appearance ture in the contemporary era.7 From this of the images themselves: it also reveals perspective, the poor image reveals the the conditions of their marginalization, the decline and degradation of the film-essay, constellation of social forces leading to their or indeed any experimental and non-com- online circulation as poor images.4 Poor mercial cinema, which in many places images are poor because they are not as- was made possible because the produc- signed any value within the class society tion of culture was considered a task of of images – their status as illicit or degraded the state. Privatization of media production grants them exemption from its criteria. gradually grew more important than state Their lack of resolution attests to their controlled/sponsored media production. appropriation and displacement.5 But, on the other hand, the rampant priva- tization of intellectual content, along with Obviously, this condition is not only con- online marketing and commodification, nected to the neoliberal restructuring of also enable piracy and appropriation; it gives media production and digital technology; it rise to the circulation of poor images.