Leann here.
I live in my head. I need to live in my body. Something about sort of underanalyzing life and letting it happen / being present is alluring. Yeah duh Leann.
I lost my iPhone the other day and bought a burner flip phone. I’ve been meaning to for a while, as part of an ongoing desire to log off, but life has a funny way of forcing you to do the things you’ve been meaning to do. I’ve felt the pull. It’s an addiction, for sure. I never felt withdrawal this strong until now. It felt like a part of my body was missing and I needed it back.
I felt the absence of the constant stream of dopamine that colors my perception of the world. I felt the absence of having 24/7 access to peer into the lives of my friends. I think perhaps the smart phone has become a lens—coloring an altered version of reality that we’ve accepted as normal.
I lost touch with this reality. And I was forced to confront the world in front of me for what it was and is in its rawest form. Which brings me to the thought I want to explore with you today.
What happens when an idea is presented in its rawest form? When the outer layers, the presentation, is stripped away and you’re left to contend with the idea itself? And you’re meant to resonate with whatever it is in front of you, curated specifically for evoking a feeling?
Hard Copy: New York seeks to evoke this emotion. The exhibition is meant to—just like living life without the safety and lens of a smart phone—strip away the outer layers that color the work and force you to contend with the idea itself. Walking through the halls of ICP surrounded by black and white Xerox prints might just heal you. Maybe not, but it’s nice to think about art in that way.
I had the pleasure of interviewing a curator of the show, Aaron Stern, who also writes the lovely Substack, Another Newsletter. We are doing a live recording of our next Archival Research Society meeting, hosted at the lovely Air office in Chinatown, NYC. It will be held as a salon-style discussion where I encourage you, if you attend, to pose questions and interrogate with us the idea of what it means to perceive a work of art in its rawest form. Is it just a form of laziness? Is it truly revealing the strength of the idea, or is it actually just hiding the absence of one?
I encourage you to attend both the meeting and see the show, on display now through May 4th (Star Wars Day).
With that being said, here’s a summary of what was discussed in our chat:
Presentation changes the meaning of an image. A photograph isn’t just the picture itself—it’s also how it’s shown. Printing it, sequencing it with other images, or placing it in a physical space can completely shift how it’s experienced.
Raw formats can lower the barrier to making work. Cheap, fast production methods like Xerox printing let artists experiment more freely. You don’t have to wait for expensive printing or institutional approval to show an idea.
A lot of the “rules” around art are just habits. Framing, perfect prints, pristine installations—these are conventions that developed over time. They’re not requirements.
We’re living through extreme image saturation. With smartphones, billions of photos are taken every day. Most of them disappear instantly—screenshots, meals, things we almost bought.
And yet more people care about photography than ever. Because everyone has a camera now, more people are paying attention to images, composition, and visual culture than ever before.
The best photographs still carry a voice. At the end of the day, a strong photograph is one where you can feel the perspective of the person who made it.
