For a long time, I’ve been thinking visually: at first photography, and recently an with expanded interest into DCGANS (a form of AI).
With photography I mostly started out as a graffiti photographer. I would wander/wonder around the Bronx on my lunch breaks (and Manhattan on the weekends) and look for great street art. It’s really a miracle of modern civilization! In dark times appreciating graffiti has always got me through. 🖤
Around 2007, I started getting into the textures and distortion of film, especially old family photographs. I scanned thousands of family photos and really got in to the look and the unprofessional aesthetic of snapshots. The lack of professional artifice in the snapshot has a permanent hold on my soul. I can literally scroll through the family photos of strangers for hours. No doom involved, but certainly nostalgia.
As a consumer of images, “LOMO” opened up the artifice of photography for me, and played into my interest in family photographs. Part of that story is about internet communities, but that is a larger topic than called for here. Aesthetically though, I was very interested in LOMO photography, but because of a few different concerns, it seemed out of reach to me.
Through clicking around, I discovered a few people online having fun with low resolution digital images. The cost barrier to these cameras was pretty low, so I grabbed one. Almost immediately I became enthralled by the images I could get out of the camera. It would glitch sometimes, but the main thing that drew me to these type of cameras was the digital “grain” which could be both melty and jagged.
The beauty of the images pushed me into years of exploring the “digital” in photography. There is are elements of futurism, retro graphics, distortion and disintegration all of which can be combined anew in each image.
The small group of people playing around with these types of cameras and early cell phone cameras loved the aesthetic, and were into it for the beauty they saw there. But few that I could find took it very seriously or “shilled” it. Eventually the small number of people interested (and my inability to elicit feedback) made it hard to push forward.
I drifted into fake (digital) LOMO images and then “regular” photography. Eventually the instagram revolution made me want to vomit and I gave up on public interaction with my photographs. I can tolerate instagram now, but it never accommodated what I wanted to do with photography, it’s really the evil twin of the snapshot in many ways.
As it turns out, another one of my passions, crypto ended up bringing me back to this passion for low resolution and digital aesthetics. I’ve been into crypto since before 2017, though I’ve never managed to hang on to much crypto. However, the technology and the community (even when it was toxic) always fascinated me. As far as NFTs go, I knew about Crypto Kitties in 2017, but because of the infinite supply they seemed irrelevant to me at the time.
In early 2021 I learned about the Cryptopunks and other similar projects, I started thinking about making my own 10k project and experimenting with how to generate images for it. This is when I stumbled on DCGANS and found out that (if I tinkered with them) they were actually great at producing a low resolution digital aesthetic that I loved, which was not unlike my earlier work. I never made a 10k, but I found something better.
Most of my work since then has been working on input data sets for DCGANS as well as tweaking the parameters of the DCGAN for more “digital” looking results. For me, low resolution (and now distorted) digital images really help me explore the relationships we form with the usually faceless people on the other side of the internet. Trying to capture these relationships and people perfectly is a mistake, but I hope to capture some of the beauty and the truth in the everyday moments we share and the relationships we form around crypto online.
Content wise, it’s very important for me to tell the story of crypto using these images. I often go down long roads that turn out to be dead ends trying to get the image to match up with our crypto story.
I’m not sure if that answered my original question “What is Low Resolution photography?”, but maybe it says a little bit about where I’m coming from and my aesthetics.
Thank you for reading, I appreciate you! 💖
You can see a few more of my low res photos in this collection: https://opensea.io/collection/the-origin-1
