I prefer my images with issues

September 26, 2025 Summer 2025

How many photos on your camera roll are “bad?” All? None? Most? How many are “perfect?” Probably less, if I had to guess.

Thanks to our phones, most of us carry around, at a minimum, thousands of digital photos in our pockets at all times. Include what you’ve posted online, and the number swells. Add the photos you can access through a quick internet search, and the figure becomes almost infinite.

Basically, we are awash in visual content. Most of it isn’t perfect. So, this summer, in Imperfect Pictures, we took these images as they were. Blurry, pixelated, badly cropped, corrupted, or otherwise flawed. We saw these artifacts as meaningful, rather than mistakes, because imperfections, noise, etc. carry history. We looked at dozens of artists' work — from artists who explore the influence of social media on image-making and circulation, like Eva & Franco Mattes, to artists who collect and repurpose found images like Penelope Umbrico — as inspiration for our own.

The marks our tools leave on the images, from watermaking to photobooth effects, were a central concern, often more relevant than the image subjects themselves. The accidental interface ephemera captured in screenshots became actual windows into  a different era. In one project, Brittany Orlando made the tool the star, passing paparazzi images of Mischa Barton from simple web image editors to knitting software to create an image that was part cross-stitch, part Inkscape.

Then, once we made these images, we considered how they were shared and how that shaped their content. Essays like Hito Steyerl’s “In Defense of the Poor Image” reminded us that pixelation and other unsavory digital artifacts are evidence of a popular image that, after being shared far and wide, has been subject to a variety of compression algorithms.

We made images intended to perform badly on social media, allowing ourselves temporary release from “posting anxiety.” Macy Gilliam ran a hyper-targeted ad campaign featuring a photo she’d taken of a classical statue while on vacation—shown only to people in Brazil who are over the age of 18, and have interests in both “Personal Computer” and meme forums. Part performance, part prank, this exercise illustrated the meaninglessness inherent to posting culture, the arbitrary rules of algorithms, and how sometimes, at the end of the day, images are just noise in one’s social media feed.

Some students experimented with hosting projects locally instead of posting them online. In doing so, desktop folders transform into sites for personal reflection and healing. Hosted within a single desktop folder, Geanna’s final project takes advantage of MacOS’s built-in folder structure to double as a site for exhibition. Embodying a diary-like experience, opening each folder reveals information that feels private; inspirational notes-to-self, reflections on influential fictional characters that shaped early childhood, motivational quotes, and more.

How do networked images change how we perform our identities? Jodi Dean’s “Selfie Communism” challenged us to imagine the selfie not as a narcissistic pursuit, but as a communal, shared form. An excerpt from Nathan Jurgenson’s The Social Photo helped us to think about our curated digital footprint as a conscious performance—and not necessarily in a bad way. With that in mind, Payton Landes made a piece that thought about the self-portraits that are captured without our knowledge, ripping a livestream video of themselves from the St. Louis Botanical Garden live stream, exploring how we behave (knowingly and unknowingly) under the presence of surveillance.

In pursuit of making self-portraits, some students like Jules Park created their own interactive tools along the way. Using p5.js, Park created a browser-based, image distortion tool that allows you to use an image as you would a paintbrush; in turn creating textured compositions. Dubbed a “brain rot recycler” by another student, the compositions may end up being blurred beyond recognition, leaving you with an entirely new image all together.

Sinclair Li’s final project took the shape of a google list with 62 contributions made by Li after visiting various museums throughout the U.S. and Canada. Instead of writing reviews about the art seen at these places, he posted detail-shots fixated on their overly mundane qualities; like outlets on the walls, exit signs, and light fixtures. It is no longer shocking that nearly every day, we make a compromise with algorithms: in exchange for making our lives slightly easier,  algorithms get unfiltered access to the intimate details and preferences of our personal lives. In Li’s performance, he uses the platform against itself in order to purposefully circulate unhelpful and impersonal information.

When Michelle Santiago Cortés came to speak to our class, she dove into the tech industry’s gothically horrific desire to smooth over our images. Glossy, perfect, and smooth, they become uncanny. It’s the imperfections that make our images ours. A stray hand or piece of furniture in eBay product photos betrays intimate glimpses into their seller’s lives. And those were what we in Imperfect Pictures were interested in.