The Post-COVID City

Disease shapes cities. Some of the most relevant developments in urban planning and management, such as mid-19th century sanitation systems, developed in response to public health crises. Now COVID-19 is joining a long list of infectious diseases, like the Spanish flu or the Ebola virus, likely to leave their mark on urban spaces.

Beyond being a “state of exception”, it has also served as a reveal of pre-existing conditions, where the poor planning and broken social systems in which we live in have become explicit. [1]

While this does not attempt to portray a simple solution for such a complex problem (and I wouldn’t promise such thing), it is a reflection on key aspects that could make change when (re)designing cities in a post-COVID world.

“Precisely because they are hubs for transnational commerce and mobility, densely populated and hyper-connected cities can amplify pandemic risk. With estimates that 68% of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050, the need to design cities well for pandemics will only get more pressing.”

— Rebecca Katz, co-director of the Centre for Global Health Science and Security (2020)

Hong Kong. Architecture of Density. Michael Wolf.

Density:

One of the most pressing questions that urban planners will face is the tension between densification – the push towards cities becoming more concentrated, which is seen as essential to improving environmental sustainability [2] – and disaggregation, the separation of populations, which is one of the key tools currently being used to hold back infection transmission.

“Density is one of the key issues in planning that can regularly create all kinds of misunderstandings and tensions but is an essential driver of our urban futures. We cannot fulfill this future without delving into the specificity of the misunderstandings and tensions.

Most urgently, we need to make clear distinctions between desirable compact urban living, and the other c-word urbanists tend to avoid: crowding. There is a fine yet highly contested line between the two.”

— Steffen Lehmann. Sustainable urbanism: towards a framework for quality and optimal density? (2016)

In the future, there will be a renewed focus on finding design solutions for individual buildings and wider neighborhoods that are dense but enable people to socialize without being crowded, packed “sardine-like” into compressed restaurants, bars, and clubs – although, given the high cost of land in big cities like New York and Hong Kong, success here may depend on significant economic reforms as well.

In the meantime, as The New York Times dance critic Gia Kourlas states, the choreography of the streets has taken on higher stakes. We already live in high-density areas, and the way we move through space may be the difference between health and sickness, life, and death. [3]

We see that 2 meters don’t mean the same to everybody, not everybody is as spacially aware, but the public consequences of our movements in public now demand a deep connection to the position and movement of the body (through the sense of proprioception).

Life is precious, and so is movement. And our awareness of it.

“The pandemic has created something fascinating: a new way of moving, a new way of dancing in the streets.

As we find ourselves in a position of cherishing what we’ve always taken for granted, we need to retrain our minds as well as our bodies because right now we’re all dancers, and we need to start acting like it.”

— Gia Kourlas (2020)

Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. Angelo Vasta.

Transportation:

City governments around the globe are concluding, transit habits will need to change. The role that buses and subway systems play in spreading the disease remains incompletely understood (and controversial), but it is clear that public transit systems risk becoming hot spots for transmission if they get too crowded.

Several European cities are now using the coronavirus crisis to reevaluate its relationship with automobiles (which threaten to become a more popular post-pandemic commuting mode when transit-anxious workers venture back to the office) and to instead put cleaner and greener transport options in place, reallocating street space from cars to expand bike and pedestrian paths.

Public transport systems will continue being a vital part of the infrastructure future, so one step may be to isolate people more from each other while on public transport.

Futurist Klaus Æ. Mogensen imagines that rather than having large, open buses and train carriages, we can divide them into smaller compartments holding just two or four people, directly accessible from the street or railway platform, keeping passengers separated by glass walls. When a compartment is vacated, it can be disinfected by ultraviolet light or a disinfectant spray, making it safe for the next passengers. A green light above a door indicates that it is now safe to enter. [4]

While we don’t know if such modes of transport may come to exist it highlights two fundamental concepts: subdivision of spaces and periodic disinfection of public areas.

Packed trains in Japan. Pat B.

Open spaces:

One solution to address the overcrowding issue was proposed by New York City councilor Corey Johnson: close off parts of the city to traffic and open them up for people.

Their street closures lasted just 11 days, but across the globe, from Calgary to Cologne, cities have been closing off streets to give people more space. Oakland has gone as far as shutting down 74 miles of city streets for walkers and cyclists.  In future cities, planning for pedestrians may go a step further by building much wider pavements, according to the Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health (2020).

Planning open spaces, distributed across our cities, with an abundance of natural elements are crucial to making sure our communities grow greener as they grow denser. Not all density is created equal—development and trees don’t compete, they support each other. Treelined streets and lively parks enhance the value of development, which in turn pays for more trees and parks. 

Therapeutic parks in Singapore. Getty Images.

Unequal patterns:

Nearly one billion people live and work in informal, under-serviced, and precarious urban conditions worldwide [5].

Poor people inhabit the lowest quality housing areas of a city. They live at the highest densities and in the most cramped accommodation. These areas have higher air pollution levels (which has been linked to a higher number of Covid-19 deaths), and poor quality or inaccessible utilities and services. They often have the smallest areas of open public spaces, and therefore are disproportionately affected by park closures due to lockdown measures on public green spaces.

Public measures do not affect all people the same and it is important to have that in mind while facilitating the wellbeing of different populations of our community.

@cecile.dormeau

Sanitation spots:

Due to our natural connection to touch, and with sanitation being such a crucial part of preventing diseases, it would be fundamental to provide handwashing facilities in public places to reduce the risk of passing infections.

“If everyone was washing their hands diligently we would see a reduction in all types of infection. Perhaps one of the reasons we’re not is because there aren’t these facilities in place.”

Sanitation spots in public spaces. Getty Images.

Adaptable spaces:

With the possibility of pandemics being recurrent, our cities will need to be more adaptable, having both the space and capability to create rapid, temporary structures.

One example of this is the temporary Nightingale Hospital in London, converted in just nine days and able to accommodate 4,000 patients and a 1,000-bed hospital in Wuhan, China, that was built from the ground up in just 10 days.

“During a crisis like we’re in at the moment, it would mean creating temporary housing and [having] health centers be built more flexibly, as well as having space available in cities for those.”

— Johan Woltjer from University of Westminster’s School of Architecture and Cities (2020)

Temporary Nightingale Hospital in London. REUTERS/Stefan Rousseau/Pool

Data mapping:

One of the biggest changes to our cities won’t be so visible as a fancy new building or a big new park, according to Davina Jackson, author of Data cities: How satellites are transforming architecture and design.

“Cities of the future are going to have to be designed to deal with completely invisible flows [like a global virus], and that’s where the data mapping comes in.”

— Davina Jackson (2020)

A city built to track pandemics would likely be filled with hidden sensors to help map the spread of diseases, such as when researchers at the Senseable City Lab at MIT placed sensors into sewers to detect concentrations of illegal drugs and harmful bacteria in specific areas.

Health passporting has been implemented in places like Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province in China, where three colors are the basis of the health surveillance system: a red QR code on your phone confines you to 14 days of self-quarantine, a yellow one cuts the quarantine to seven days, while anyone lucky enough to have a green code can move around as they wish.

The objective of the system, which is run by the online payment platform Alipay, is to monitor each person’s movements around the city (which requires careful consideration about privacy implications) and any changes in their health to identify whether they are at risk of contracting Covid-19 or of infecting others.

Each Hangzhou resident must input their personal data, record their temperature daily and report on their general health, as well as scanning their phone whenever they enter their own home or anyone else’s, rent a bike, travel on a train or bus, or go into a shop, bank, market or park. 

Re-balancing:

It’s absurd that in many cases the most important things are the most abandoned in society, like healthcare and education, and this situation is just another reflection of how we are living in an imbalanced infrastructure that does not meet our needs.

If this time serves us for anything may it be to rethink our priorities.

The very nature of pandemics is that they are dependent on the interactions of humans with their environment and with each other, and this massive interruption in our lives makes us increasingly aware of the importance of health systems, of being around nature, and even having physical human contact.

“We have abused nature, and [generated] epidemics. Before thinking about new cities, the focus should be on preventing new diseases from emerging in the first place. I believe that cities against pandemics will be just that, places where each species will find respect in coexistence.”

— Roberto Palomba (2020)

Many are also seeing the links between the climate and the COVID-19 crises. Furthermore, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that three out of four new or emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic — the result of our broken relationship with animals and natural ecosystems. [6]

Human beings and their activities have significantly altered 75% of the land and 66% of the oceans [7], changing the planet to such an extent as to determine the birth of a new era called the “Anthropocene”.

The pathway of pandemics. WWF.

The COVID-19 pandemic is not a crisis of the city, but the crisis of a certain kind of city.

Decades of “market-oriented” policies have imposed severe limits on the public planning system – human healthcare, environmental and biodiversity protection, food distribution, housing, transport, services – to respond meaningfully to (and protect us from) a pandemic.

A city’s ability to limit the scale and severity of a crisis and disaster ultimately depends on the extent of popular control over decision making, the level of social equity, the quality of our public infrastructure, and the responsiveness of our planning system. Our cities are vulnerable because we have weakened their ability to anticipate, prepare, and respond to crises.

Can the deep human, economic, and social costs of this tragedy trigger a change?

It is a time that may serve to course-correct and work towards fairer, more resilient cities in the wake of COVID-19. Some communities are taking the moment to push sustainability and health policies, now that we have proof that we can make change, and adapt to it at a fast pace.

Sincerely, wearing masks 24/7 and maintaining six feet distance as a new design unit (when we know that placemaking thrives by social livability and connections) does not feel like a desirable new normal.

Cities flourish on the opportunities for work and play, and the endless variety of available goods and services. If fear of disease becomes the new reality, cities could be in for a bland and antiseptic future.

It is important to analyze the many things that have gone wrong, as well as what we have done better than before, with considerations in key areas such as the governance of our cities, how they are designed, and our social behavior in response to a crisis.

Now emphasis shifts away from personal experience and toward responsibilities in the underlying realities that bind us. Dashboards and statistical models of contagion have become the visual profile of the event, and the image of our interconnected whole seen in these reflections should stay with us, long after the crisis passes. 

The challenge is learning to see our place in the world differently and acting on it.

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References:

1. Bratton, B. (2020) 18 lessons of quarantine urbanism. https://strelkamag.com/en/article/18-lessons-from-quarantine-urbanism

2. Leung, A. (2019) The Key to Green Cities and Mindsets: Densification.

   https://meetingoftheminds.org/the-key-to-green-cities-and-mindsets-densification-14887

3. Kourlas, G. (2020) How We Use Our Bodies to Navigate a Pandemic. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/arts/dance/choreographing-the-street-coronavirus.html

4. Mogensen, K. (2020) Pandemics and the Future of Public Transport.

   https://medium.com/copenhagen-institute-for-futures-studies/pandemics-and-the-future-of-public-transport-1b607b888404

5. Wilkinson, A. (2020) The impact of COVID-19 in informal settlements – are we paying enough attention?

   https://www.ids.ac.uk/opinions/the-impact-of-covid-19-in-informal-settlements-are-we-paying-enough-attention/

6. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2017) Zoonotic Diseases. https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/zoonotic-diseases.html

7. WWF. (2019) Scientists’ warn of looming ecological collapse must prompt policy action. https://www.wwf.eu/?uNewsID=346735

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Fundamentals of User-Friendly Design

As a creative, it’s fascinating to dig deeper into the origin of the ideas you swim among, so that you might better examine—and even challenge—the values you put into the things you make.

The book User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play, by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant, goes through the journey of explaining how the “user-friendly” concept was invented, how it shapes our everyday rhythms, and where it may go next.

I do recommend going through the whole book (I especially enjoyed the historic perspective), and from it, these are key concepts to consider in the design of user-friendly products:

1. Feedback

Feedback is what defines how a product behaves in response to what you want, allowing designers to communicate with their users without words.

“There may be no greater design challenge for the twenty-first century than creating better, tighter feedback loops in places where they don’t exist, be they in the environment, health care, or government.”

— p.34

As the authors put it, “feedback is the fundamental language of user-friendly design”, which is a well-known idea in areas of user-experience. However, the big challenge with designing feedback is figuring out when and where to provide it.

“I am awed by the ever-expanding universe of ways designers provide feedback. And yet feedback is often nuisance—just think of the phone alerts that always seem to appear at the wrong time. It turns out that appropriate feedback is a harder design problem to solve than you think, and we are all intuitively aware when it misses the mark”

— p.311

Dots Hello by Equal Parts Studio

2. Mental models

Mental models are the intuitions we have about how something works—how its pieces and functions fit together. They’re based on the things we’ve used before; you might describe the entire task of user experience as the challenge of fitting a new product to our mental models of how things should work.

Almost all of design stems from making sure that a user can figure out what to do, and can tell what is going on.  The beauty and difficulty lie in what happens when the object at hand is new, but needs to feel familiar so that its newness isn’t baffling.

We need to understand how products fit into existing ideas and concepts of function, so new tools make sense in people’s lives. Otherwise, they may result too confusing or strange, like promising digital assistants that end up with only 3 percent of people using them regularly after two weeks of buying them.

“Humans might fail—but they are not wrong. And if you try to mirror their thinking a little, even the stupidest and strangest things that people do have their own indelible logic.”

— p.26

3. Behavior

Behavior is the spine of the user-friendly world, no matter whether you’re talking about smartphones or toothbrushes or driverless cars: a deference to the complexity of understanding people as they live.

“All the nuances of designing new products can be reduced to one of two basic strategies: either finding what causes us pain and trying to eliminate it, or reinforcing what we already do with a new object that makes it so easy it becomes second nature. The truest material for making new things isn’t aluminum or carbon fiber. It’s behavior.”

— p.96

Similarly, I like the idea of designer Naoto Fukasawa, that the best designs “dissolve into behavior” so that they become invisible rather than stand out for their artistry.

4. Metaphors

Metaphors are a powerful tool for designers and are also linked to our mental models and general understanding of the world. 

It is through metaphors that language and understanding grow from simple things to more complex things. We start with things we understand, like the body, and our own simple behaviors, and create new language:

“The human body is a particularly generative “metaphier”, creating previously unspeakable distinctions in a throng of areas. The head of an army, table, page, bed, ship, household, or nail, or of steam or water; the face of a clock, cliff, card, or crystal; the eyes of needles, winds, storms, targets, flowers, or potatoes… and so on and on…

All of these concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects. Indeed, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication.”

— Jaynes, J. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (2000)

This extends to everything, including products and technology.

An example is the idea of your email “inbox”, which borrows its logic from your mail, versus social network “feeds” based on streams of constantly flowing content, like a river. You probably at least glance at every email that you receive—simply because they were meant for you. 

Streams are entirely different metaphors. It’s there for the taking, if we wish to, not that we have to. It’s a reason why random, multiple messages from your friends on Instagram are okay but they would be rude via e-mail. Each one has its own set of rules but thanks to metaphors we don’t have to list them all out.

@zambonato

5. Trust

A technology’s success depends not only on the fact of whether it works or not, but whether we trust it, and “the secret is that we come to trust machines only if they mimic the way we come to trust other people.”

Therefore, transparency and clarity are key.

“There are three things an autonomous car has to get right. Above all, we need to know what mode a car is in, whether it’s driving itself or not. [Then] for us not to get surprised, then freaked out by a driverless car, we need to know what it is going to do before it’s actually done. Finally, we need perfectly clear transitions when a car takes control, or when we take control from a car.”

— p.106

Especially when something is new to use, what may seem like over-communication is crucial to make sure there is an understanding between machines and people, and a clear idea of what to expect, according to the features and limitations of the product.

Accidents with self-driving cars have happened, in some cases, due to a mismatch between what people think (or are promised) the “autopilot” function can achieve, and what it actually does, generating a lack of trust.

Along the same lines, the manners of a product (not living, nevertheless interactive elements) are also fundamental. Designs have to understand what’s appropriate or tactful, or simply nice, because that’s the way humans build trust.

“While politeness seems like a trivial detail, it is a design constraint as real as the heat tolerance of steel or the melting point of plastic.”

— p.108

Clippy was unconscionably rude, and “a rude machine is worse than one that simply doesn’t work.”

6. “Form follows emotion”

User-friendly design is about much more than usability—many designers are often surprised by how much user satisfaction is driven by the emotional rather than the functional benefits of an experience. 

The connection between emotional aesthetics and usability was first documented in 1995 by researchers from the Hitachi Design Center who tested variations of an ATM user interface, finding a stronger correlation between the participants’ ratings of aesthetic appeal and perceived ease of use, even over their actual ease of use.

Not that you have to choose one or the other, of course, but “the right emotional connection with a user can make up for some of the challenges, from poor feedback to a convoluted mental model”, so a beautiful, emotional savvy product will contribute to, or even define, how usable it is.

Facce by Stefano Marra

7. Hierarchy of needs

In hiding great complexity behind alluringly simple buttons, we also lose the ability to control how things work, to take them apart, and to question the assumptions that guided their creation.

Modern user experience is becoming a black box: “this is an iron law of user-friendliness: the more seamless an experience is, the more opaque it becomes.”

“A world on instantaneous, dead-simple interactions is also a world devoid of higher-order desires and intents that can’t readily be parsed in a button. While it may become easier and easier to consume things, it will become harder and harder to express what we truly need.”

— p.269

But human needs are not the same as convenient consumption, yet we have been living for decades assuming they are alike.

“User friendly is about deferring to the desires of the users. But there’s a hierarchy of desires. There’s a sense of wanting to eat that cheeseburger, but there’s also that higher-level desire [...] to be healthy and happy long term.”

— Justin Rosenstein, p.269

It is easy enough for us to tell our phones what we like in micro-detail: whether we like this or that story on our feed, or whether we like a song on Spotify and would like to have similar suggestions. These interactions have been optimized to a fine point. 

Yet what we cannot tell our phone is what kind of overarching experience we’d like in our digital lives.

It would be wonderful to have products that help us achieve our bigger goals instead of seamlessly pushing instant gratifications (frequently associated to draining our attention or budget in the package of giving you what you want).

The next phase in user experience should be to change our founding metaphors so that we can express our higher needs, not just our immediate preferences. 

“In helping people understand their world better, in creating the incentives and feedback loops for us to achieve better things, user-friendliness will be an assumed part of whatever comes next.”

@yukai_du

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References:

Kuang, C., Fabricant, R. (2019) User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play. MCD.

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Digital Everything

In a moment where there is no proximity and touch possible as a consequence of measures like physical distancing and nationwide lockdowns, everything suddenly has to be digital. Technology has been expanding to many areas, and one consequence of the pandemic will be the acceleration of digital experiences.

Companies are realizing that the meeting could, in fact, have been an email, and there is probably no going back in many cases. Remote work will most likely increase, but aside from work a whole range of experiences are obliged to turn to digital channels to interact with their audience.

From education to clubbing, theater, and fashion week events are making use of technology to engage with people all over the world. 

Shangai’s Online Fashion Week - Asia Tatler (2020)

How can we then, create digital experiences that are more connected to the physical? How can we be together while far apart? How can we express ourselves, when we are tied to the narrow possibilities of specific tools? And most importantly, how do we evolve those tools to express who we truly are?

Of the many possibilities, some emerging trends that show us an evolution of the digital world:

Digital identities:

Digital identity will evolve beyond the current formats of text, voice, and video that connect us today, as 3D avatars emerge to dress, work and play in simulated worlds.

According to WGSN [1], in 2022, lifelike digital avatars – virtual stand-ins that faithfully reproduce facial expressions, gestures, and voice – will allow people to communicate in VR as naturally as they would if they were in the same room. Freed from physical limitations, consumers will embrace multiple identities and move seamlessly between digital subcultures.

Facebook’s Codec Avatar project is working on generating digital doubles for consumers, opening the way for a deeper sense of connection and social presence in VR. 

Codec Avatar - Facebook (2019)

The Future Laboratory [2] states that as brands become more entrenched in our social interactions, digital avatar ‘friends’ that are relatable rather than faceless bots will be crucial in formulating a brand personality. 

Samsung’s Neon avatars, for instance, are designed to be ‘friends’ with humans, with realistic characters powered by AI. 

Neon Life avatars - Samsung (2020)

“In the near future, one will be able to license or subscribe to a Neon as a service representative, financial adviser, healthcare provider or concierge.

Neons will work as tv anchors, spokespeople or movie actors, or they can simply be companions and friends showing the potential of brands to be the voice of these personal relationships.’

”

— Pranav Mistry, CEO of Samsung Star Labs (2019)

Digital retail:

AR and VR is predicted to soar to a $571.42 billion market by 2025 [3], as consumers accept these technologies as the new normal. As Covid-19 traps people in their homes, this tech is set to accelerate in a post-corona world.

Obsess is an AR and VR shopping platform that allows brands to create immersive shopping experiences that can be enjoyed in combination with physical spaces. In the wake of Covid-19 it's now inviting retailers to launch their own virtual spaces.

While it's not yet possible for shoppers to experience these virtual stores together in a digital realm, this type of social shopping experience is not so far fetched. Facebook Horizon is a new VR social platform with an interactive user journey that connects real-world peers on a third platform. While it's still in beta, it may facilitate users to virtually shop with peers in real time, despite being physically apart [4].

Obsess - Courtesy of Obsess (2019)

Digital materiality:

Materials and objects built and maintained outside of the physical world will clothe and contextualize our digital identities, through digital fashion and interiors.

This shift will see the rise of a new era of digital craftsmanship, led by artisans of the virtual world.

In May 2019, Amsterdam-based digital-only fashion house The Fabricant sold the world’s first digital couture dress for $9,500 via a blockchain, envisioning a future where fashion transcends the physical.

Iridescende Digi-Couture Dress sold for $9500 - The Fabricant (2019)

The surge of digital clothing and interior collections could appear as a more sustainable alternative and expand the possibilities of expression, considering the reduced material resources and waste, and the freedom of not having to obey the same laws that dictate the physical world. 

These could be of use especially in situations where the objects are used only once and then most likely discarded, like photo shoots and events (being an even further example of how some things could actually exist only for the photograph). 

Digital collaboration:

Technological products will continue to evolve the way we work together.

Spatial is an AR and VR collective computing platform transforming how workers create and collaborate remotely, using 3D avatars.

“We’re not [currently] able to transmit touch and muscle movement through the internet, but we will with the low latency capabilities of 5G,” says Mischa Dohler, a professor of wireless communications at King’s College London. His Internet of Skills project [5] predicts using 5G for seamless remote global collaboration – for example, an employee wearing a haptic suit could manipulate a robot to manufacture or inspect a product in real time, continents apart. 

So not only design, which already happens remotely with teams collaborating from different areas of the world, but the manufacturing of products could include artisans and experts from different locations.

Roomone (2019)

If we could remotely transmit tactile (and multisensory) inputs through technological devices perhaps we could dream of actually grasping objects, spaces, and people, no matter where they are. It changes everything.

Virtual worlds will be a key outlet for consumer creativity and expression, and the birthplace of aesthetic trends and subcultures. They will—continue to—change and expand the way we connect and portray ourselves.

But how do we want this to move forward? What kind of phygital future would we want to create?

Now is the time to design it (instead of letting it evolve into an ugly Black Mirror episode where we didn’t have a say in), by redefining what is possible and taking advantage of technology to serve the of what it means to be human.

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References:

1. WGSN. (2019) Future Innovations 2022.

2. The Future Laboratory (2020) The Transformative Twenties.

3. Valuates Report (2019) Augmented and Virtual Reality Market by Organization Size: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2018 - 2025.

4. WGSN. (2020) Social Media Commerce 2020.

5. Dohler, M. et al. (2017) Internet of skills, where robotics meets AI, 5G and the Tactile Internet

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On photography

“I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to “trap” life in the act of living. ”

— Henri Cartier-Bresson

People are making more images than ever before. Virtually everyone with a mobile phone has a digital camera to take pictures. Facebook says more than 350 million pictures are posted daily, which is more than the total USA population. This is only on their platforms.

In a moment where photography is readily available everywhere you see, the seminal collection of essays by Susan Sontag (published in 1977) On Photography, are still relevant to think about our relationship with images.

The World is Beautiful (one of the first photographic bestsellers) by Albert Renger-Patzsch. (1928)

Photography as reality

With photography as a way of ‘collecting’ reality in a way we believe as accurate, Sontag warns about the traffic of images as proof, or even substitute, of the real world:

“Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it.””

“The problem is that not only can photographs lie – something we still struggle to believe – but they lie on every level. They lie because they are a selective choice of what reality we intend to show. They lie because most photographs are anything but what people think they are – an accurate representation of what is photographed.”

“It seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera along. Photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had.”

With social media photostreams, the ultimate attempt to control, frame, and package our lives, this idealized photographic image is visible, with extreme examples such as influencer fake travels.

Sontag comments that “ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it”, or as she recalls nineteenth-century aesthete Mallarmé who said everything in the world exists in order to end in a book, she claims: “today everything exists to end in a photograph.”

Tourists heading to Bali to take pictures at the iconic lake in #gatesofheaven have been left stunned to discover it doesn't exist. Getty images.

Photography as a mental frame

It is not only those things we photograph what represents our way of seeing, but the photographies to which we have constant exposure can also frame our responses towards beauty and pain, being capable of diminishing our behavioral and mental responses.

“Knowing a great deal about what is in the world (art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature) through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved, when they see the real thing.”

“To suffer is one thing, another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. [...] Images transfix. Images anesthetize.

[...] The vast photographic catalog of misery and injustice throughout the world has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary—making it appear familiar, remote (“it’s only a photograph”), inevitable.”

There are too many images of catastrophes and atrocity but we can’t go numb. We don’t need to see too many of them either. Just evaluate what is real and act accordingly.

Child Swims In Polluted Reservoir, Pingba. Reuters/China Daily.

As Jessica Helfand writes in The Self-Reliance Project series, stories of suffering are now a fixture in our news feeds. But it is images like Fabio Bucciarelli's portrait of a woman in her home in Gazzaniga, Italy, that cut through all the reportage and the rhetoric because they offer us a mirror on something else, something hard to see, perhaps, because it is so familiar.

To stop and reflect for a moment on the universality of one person’s profoundly human expression is an aggregation of everything you know to be true.” 

Maddalena Peracchi photographed by Fabio Bucciarelli for The New York Times. March, 19, 2020.

Photography as participation and alienation

The act of photography has a duality of transforming the photographer into both an intimate observer of the frame, catching details that could skip the common eye, and an agent that is detached of its surroundings.

“Photography is also a powerful instrument for depersonalizing our relationship with the world.”

According to Sontag it would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph and turn the experience itself into a way of seeing, supporting the idea that photography interposes itself between us and the ‘real world’ in a way that merely looks like engagement, but is in fact satisfied with a symbolic, morally immobilizing gesture:

“Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention.”

“A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it — by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.

Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture. This gives shape to experience: stop, take a photograph, and move on. ”

Tourists posing around the Tower of Pisa. Photography credits: unknown.

Photography and time

The capacity of photographs to achieve high detailed images and to “trap life” as it occurs, as mentioned by photographer Cartier-Bresson, gives it the ability to frame a unique reflection of reality during a specific time.

It is a way of collecting unrepeatable moments for future memory when perhaps you can’t remember them as precisely anymore.

“For while paintings or poems do not get better, more attractive simply because they are older, all photographs are interesting as well as touching if they are old enough.”

It is also touching that what you capture will never be the same anymore. Your niece won’t be as little a baby, your face and body will change, the people in the background won’t be there the next time you go.

Photography is both an attempted antidote to our mortality paradox and a deepening awareness of it:

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

First cellphone photo ever taken and shared with others online. Philippe Kahn. (1997)

As stated by Paul Strand, your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees. You may see and be affected by other people’s ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will eventually have to free yourself from them.

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The Gap

I know that I’m not as good as I want to be in several areas of creative practice (drawing, public speaking, to name a few). It doesn’t mean that I do a bad job, it can serve its purposes well (and if it doesn't, then it's better to delegate it to someone else).

But it could be fantastic, because you can recognize fantastic work when it’s in front of you. And knowing that it’s not there yet secretly drives me crazy sometimes.

Can’t everyone see?

So I found great relief in the advice of This American Life’s host and producer Ira Glass, where he speaks precisely about this feeling:

Animation by David Shiyang Liu.

“Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean?

A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have.

And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal.

And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?
”

It's easier to recognize beauty than it is to create it. 

When you find yourself in this frustrating limbo, the challenge is to never forget what got you there in the first place. You already have good taste. Go build work until it matches your ambitions. Close the gap.

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