We went to Kent Cornucopia Days for the first time since we checked it out right after I immigrated here and were surprised by how much the weekend fair had grown over the years; and these are post-pandemic days too, you’ll remember. Spread across the whole downtown core, it felt like a mashup of a farmers’ market and a state fair, minus the rides and plus the sociopolitical quirks you’d expect of a town like Kent. There were some surprises too. I took a bunch of photos and will be posting them for however long feels curatorially appropriate.
I read an article recently about the “photo-secessionists,” a group of photographers who reacted to the advent of ubiquitous image-making with the introduction of the first Kodak (“you press the button, we’ll do the rest”) by making photos that looked more painterly. It was their way of distinguishing art (theirs) from non-art (that). This amused me because I remember reading about a similar reaction among painters when photography’s pictorial fidelity to the real seemed to threaten their place in the pantheon; it’s a push and pull that seems less important to us today, just as a new enemy is at the gates, threatening us all.
We’re already seeing Polaroid trying to capitalize on AI anxiety with a marketing campaign that announces the revenge of the analogue and unreproducible. We’ll probably see a lot of products trying to meet that need, the saw way that apps like “BeReal” have been gesturing at some kind of deeper digital authenticity in the age of targeting and hypercuration (I saw another one of these pop up on my feed, no doubt targeting my demographic, and it gave me sass for my snark about late-stage capitalism lol). But I’m curious about how photographic images themselves will change at this inflection point. Will a new “secession” emerge? What will it look like?
Maybe the pendulum will swing back from mirrors to windows again. Maybe we’ll gesture towards the unfiltered and unprompted with an anti-style that presents life “as-is” (which it never is) in reaction to having every look and feel at our fingerprints. Maybe it’ll look a lot more like the first Kodak. We press the button and let the world do the rest.
It might look like this photo. How would AI come up with that? “Generate an image of the kind of guy who will never be satisfied with how tough on crime we are waiting for his wife while a self-defense instructor looks at the camera suspiciously and a group of evangelicals weigh some hearts against a feather in the background.” Or something.
I’m not worried. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
The old idea of the window/mirror dialectic will rear its head again, but in reality (in practice), photography remains about seeing through a glass darkly. Sometimes we catch our reflection; most times we focus on the forms we see on the other side. The rabbit is a duck, the duck becomes a rabbit, and on and on it goes as a matter of preference and emphasis.
This is true of everything we fabricate (late Middle English: from Latin fabricat– ‘manufactured’, from the verb fabricare, from fabrica ‘something skillfully produced’). I’ve started reading a book about “the imaginal” (not imaginary) and it’s still slow-going. It’s the kind of book that spends three chapters walking you through the history of words and how they’re used or not used in that academic sort of way that covers all bases before saying anything new, so I’m still unsure where it’s all going, but I have a sense of something generative in this concept. The imaginal as the capacity for images, visual or otherwise. My gut tells me this idea will gain more importance in our brave new-old world.
There were a couple of unexpected stalls out here too like this one for PSL and another for Scientology. Notice has neither were very overt about who they are.
There’s a fine line between trying to capture childhood glee out in public and being invasive and creepy. I like how I found that balance in this frame.
The licorice monger in the red glasses made me chuckle when she asked me if I’d had real black licorice before with a tone of concern. I said “yes, I love it,” and she replied: “okay, but this has real anise in it,” just in case I wanted to turn back before it was too late. I said: “I’d be upset if it didn’t.”