Looking at Hito Steyerl’s “In Defense of the Poor Image” from a new angle
Hito Steyerl opens her essay by calling the poor image an “illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image.” When I first read it, this phrase made me question the current condition of visual culture, but I don’t think I went deep enough to understand it fully. Returning to it now, after building a device in which an image is designed to die, I find that her essay and my work answer the same question in opposite ways: where, precisely, does the life of an image reside?
Steyerl’s answer is circulation. Images, she argues, are ranked in a hierarchy based on resolution, in which high resolution becomes a fetish, a marker of completeness and wealth. “Rich” images carry ease and privilege, while cheaper, degraded copies give everyone else a blurry, out-of-focus version of culture. Yet this loss is exactly what makes the poor image democratic. Through compression it becomes accessible and travels beyond its original carrier, gaining an afterlife and finding new meanings as it moves. Works once forgotten or locked away in archives are resurrected online as poor images. The poor image is no longer about the original. It is about its own conditions of existence, and for Steyerl this makes it both resistance and exploitation at once. An image lives in its afterlife: when it stops moving, it stops living. Steyerl doesn’t only argue this; her essay enacts it. Published freely online, it has since circulated as countless PDFs and screenshots, excerpted and reuploaded, open to anyone. The essay has become a poor image of itself, and its reach is its proof.
My work, imagotchi, was looking for the opposite answer. It cannot be quoted or reuploaded; it resists replication altogether. Instead of spreading across many people, it is designed as a live, limited encounter with one person. In it, an image’s life sits in its resolution and in its place. The person deletes the photo from their phone, so the device keeps the one and only copy. Its resolution is shown as a number on the screen, it loses pixels when neglected, and sharing it makes both copies poorer. Instead of granting the image an afterlife, I give it a limited lifespan, in an attempt to make it more visible and precious. After re-reading Steyerl, I realised what this means. By making resolution the measure of health, I was unconsciously complying with the very class system she describes. In trying to rescue the image from circulation, I adopted the hierarchy that circulation was meant to undo.
And yet the most important moment in my piece contradicts this. I wanted to design care into the relationship between a person and an image: a reciprocity in which the image’s resolution, and eventually its existence, depends on human attention. When it calls for that attention, and if nobody answers, it loses pixels. This seems to confirm, at first, the superiority of resolution once again. Yet in practice, the intention of it does the opposite. Based on my observations and research, the less defined the image becomes, the more it is cherished, which, for example, can be observed in the family archive images as they gradually deteriorate. Without sharp detail, it leaves a gap for interpretation, drawing the viewer into deciphering and guessing rather than passively consuming a polished image that leaves nothing to imagine. At the very moment the image asks to be looked at, it is a poor image. So in the end, my work agrees with Steyerl more than I expected: losing resolution doesn’t only take something from the image, it also gives something back.
Yet, in my opinion, our perspectives differ. Steyerl’s argument feels outdated since it was written in 2009, her defence of speed can be explained by the earlier condition of abundance. The speed of transmission that she acknowledged has since become the condition of the stare: images are now consumed as a flow rather than encountered one by one. Following McLuhan’s argument in The Medium Is the Message (1964) that media reshape perception itself, I would argue that this flow has made us less attuned to images, moving our attention from content and intellectual effort to quantity. We now read visual culture in terms of trends and aesthetics rather than as single images. That’s why imagotchi grounds the viewer; its slowness becomes a counter-condition to the mass-produced media. The leap we took from contemplation to distraction, which Steyerl treats with ambivalence, seems like an overlooked condition which became disastrous to image culture.
Abundance has also produced a culture of permanence: because nothing is ever deleted, we imagine the infrastructure can hold everything. Through weightless metaphors, we built the illusion of a boundless internet, when it is in fact enabled by very physical infrastructure. Steyerl herself later describes the internet spilling offline into the world in “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” (2013). Read today, her proposal to value images as things that lose matter and gain speed strongly comply with the illusion of weightlessness. She writes that the poor image’s “lack of resolution attests to their appropriation and displacement.” Yet I don’t believe an image should be displaced, left in the network with no home of its own. In a culture where nothing is deleted, it begins with a deletion. So, the romanticized perspective on a ‘poor’ wandering image doesn’t feel that plausible anymore.
Steyerl’s argument feel even less convincing when image at circulation has a new destination. In “Mean Images” (2023), Steyerl describes AI-generated images as statistical median of scraped images taken from training datasets. The movement that gave poor images their afterlife in 2009 now feeds systems that produce polished and biased images. funnily enough that very circulation that once rescued images from the archive, now delivers them to the dataset. This is why my practice looks for counter-conditions to envision a better future through collective speculative practices.
Placed side by side, Steyerl’s essay and my work demonstrate that the essence or ‘life’ of an image does not solely reside in its speed of circulation or degree of resolution; rather, my central claim is that an image lives in the quality of attention it receives. This argument shifts the question from how best to preserve an image’s wholeness to how the experience of loss might generate engagement rather than erasure. However, this perspective reveals a significant tension within my own practice: removing a private image from circulation could shield it from exploitation, yet may also risk elevating it to the status of an exclusive or privileged object. As such, I am left with more precise questions: Can the intentional design of attention avoid becoming a mere imposition? Is it possible to foster shared care for images, as Steyerl’s poor images do, without relying on circulation? And if it is loss that renders an image visible, should future iterations of imagotchi embrace the condition of the poor image?
Steyerl’s conception of the poor image emphasizes its vitality through perpetual circulation, embodying a form of agency by remaining in motion. In contrast, my approach centers on the image’s potential to gain significance through stillness, inviting sustained attention rather than passive consumption. By juxtaposing these two positions, it becomes evident that the life of an image may reside not solely in its movement across networks, but also in its capacity to foster meaningful engagement when held in place. This comparison invites further consideration of how images might be designed or curated to elicit genuine care and attention within contemporary visual culture.