How many images do you take before you get the right one ? How many images do you have to see before you see the right one ? Both have increased exponentially in the last decade and show no signs of slowing down. Are their more great pictures in return. Do we see more masterpieces than we did 10 years ago? or even just plain great shots ? Not really. It seems that what has increased the most are those pictures in the middle, those OK pictures that sit in between the bad ones and the excellent ones. More and more medium quality images that are passable, those that might even trigger a slight emotional reaction of sort ( a twitch at the corner of your mouth, a milli fraction of a second of sympathy, even an infinitesimal surprise), make it to the surface of our visual landscape.

They are acceptable, of course, and for lack of anything better, perform their duties. But boy are they becoming boring. The banality of medium, average, good enough is polluting our visual landscape with trashable images that contain no other information than the apparent lack of talent of the photographer ( and photo editor). They are forgotten as soon as they are clicked upon, returning thankfully to their state of nothingness, where they truly belong. 

The combination of fully automated photographic equipment ( they should be banned) along with an ever growing army of underpaid clueless millennium generation photo editor has created a seemingly endless stream of medium of the road imagery that splatter our visual landscape with static noise. There are no true gatekeepers anymore as there are no gates left. It gives the false impression that photography is everywhere when , in fact, it is nowhere. Gone are the filters of taste and education, vanished are the gates of self respect and authority, demolished are the boundaries between talent and the common. What we witness is a constant flow of images, quite like the dirty rivers that cross our cities, which we ignore by force of habit and lack of interest. 

Sometimes, almost by accident it seems, we stumble on the rare and few that makes our search all worthwhile. We are taken by surprise, as if both the taking and publishing of the photograph was a freak coincidence . Here is a short selection of those for this week.

Paul Melcher