Bored of Very Serious Photography?
Nothing on your skin.
When I look at much of the “in-vogue” contemporary photography, I don’t feel rejection. I feel boredom. A deep boredom—not born of any intolerance for the new, but from the oppressive sense of recognizing the same script over and over, performed in the same flat voice, with the same impeccable emotional distance. It isn’t visual fatigue: it’s the feeling of watching a repeated exercise—correct, polished, already familiar.
It strikes me as a kind of photography that has made safety its only dogma. It takes no risks, it doesn’t expose the person behind the camera, it doesn’t truly involve the viewer. It’s as if an unwritten code of conduct had been established—an antiseptic neutrality, a textbook detachment, a refinement that must be conceptual before it is visual—and everyone, to be admitted into the game, repeats it with minimal, insignificant variations. It isn’t a language: it’s a shield. A perimeter so controlled it suffocates any breath.
For me, that safety is the opposite of tension. It completely lacks that electricity of “this could have gone wrong,” the smear, the imbalance, the formal or emotional risk that makes an image alive—and dangerous. Everything is smoothed out, premeditated, over-calculated. A smoothness that doesn’t come from rigor, but from fear of making mistakes. Often the only thing truly well written is the wall text, while the frame remains mute, composed, obedient.
I recognize the mastery of the discourse. It’s often erudite, laden with references, perfectly aligned with contemporary art talk. But too many of these works strike me as conceptually anemic: they announce grand themes—the Anthropocene, identity, borders—only to illustrate them with interchangeable images that could support almost any argument, as long as they’re paired with the right statement. The idea resides entirely in the text, never in the act of seeing.
The result is an elegant but empty photography, far more interested in positioning itself correctly within the system—galleries, grants, criticism—than in getting its hands dirty with the visceral complexity of the world, of history, or of the body. This isn’t an occasional drift; it’s a precise mode of operation. It’s an operation of branding, not of vision.
What I find most symptomatic is the automatic suspicion—almost a conditioned reflex—toward the “beautiful,” toward form that takes openly responsibility. As if pursuing a powerful composition, an equilibrium of forms that cuts, an aesthetic choice that isn’t understatement, were immediately suspect—“retro,” not intelligent. I’m not talking about decoration, but about form as a position.
For me the matter is simple: form matters—deeply. A rigorous composition isn’t ornament; it is embodied visual thought, the way you take a stance—physically—before your subject. Abandoning the search for powerful form in the name of a supposed neutrality or a fashionable anti-aestheticism isn’t liberating at all: it isn’t renunciation, it’s surrender. It’s adherence to another codified style, no more honest or authentic than the others. It’s deadpan elevated to cliché.
My suspicion is that much contemporary photography has institutionalized boredom, transforming it into a legitimate aesthetic. As if the absence of risk had been mistaken for maturity, as if the only “serious” way to speak about the present were to be flat, detached, emotionally drained. A realism without reality.
I want to feel that the photographer is there. That they’re risking something—in the moving body, in the gaze that misframes, in the blinding light, in the composition that asserts itself with force even at the cost of being imperfect, excessive, out of place. I want the evidence of a choice, not the mimicry of a code. This is the risk I’m interested in taking—even if it excludes.
If that means standing outside the perimeter of what is considered acceptable, I’m more than fine with it. I would far rather a kind of photography that tries to say something through the power of its forms, even if it limps, than an impeccable perfection that, once the gallery lights go out, leaves absolutely nothing on your skin.
