Reflecting on Hito Steyerl’s ‘In Defence of the Poor Image’

Nine 35mm film frames from Stan Brakhage’s ‘Existence is Song’ (1987).

The poor image starts life being a copy on the move, so increasingly deteriorated and mangled by the multitude of digital analogue hybrid processes that we doubt it ever existed as a clear focussed entity. As an image disperses, it becomes poorer; every rip, edit, upload and share further pushing it towards a kind of visual abstraction.

Having low resolution equated with lower status in the hierarchy of images Steyerl explains with cinemas being the high-end outlet and DVD and television coming next followed by on-line poor copy. Poor images are poor because of their low status. The commercialisation of cinema in the 1980’s stifled the video essay and the experimental film. However, with the advent of video streaming on publicly accessible platforms like YouTube things changed.

As Julia García Espinosa said, “Perfect cinema, technically and artistically is almost always reactionary cinema.” Imperfect cinema blurs distinctions between consumer and producer and with access to video production and digital communication technology, the producer group is huge. The networks of the poor image are a battleground for commercial and national agendas but also porn and paranoia.

The poor image made and seen by many; popular images now defined by being heavily compressed and travel quickly. But this makes the poor image a part of the information capitalism of short attention spans. However, it does create an alternative economy of images, as well satisfy the desires of commercial industry.

Steyerl’s essay elevates the poor image as a political idea; it’s as much about defiance and appropriation as it is conformism and exploitation. No longer about the real thing but the nature of the poor images’s existence.

It is about reality.

You can read Hito Steyerl’s In Defence of the Poor Image here.