Month: November 2025

Throughout the three methods, I am constantly discovering new ways of researching. Some are more obvious, ones I have never tried before, and some are unique approaches I would never have thought of. All of these methods have pushed me to create projects that are conceptually stronger and have a meaningful connection to the existing material I’m working with, while also giving it new life. I’ve learned to pick apart what matters, what’s intriguing, and what I can translate into a visual language. There’s no one right approach or answer for a single project, only the approach that best suits the context. Although research matters, letting the project become what it is naturally is just as important as trying to mold it into something it isn’t just to make it portfolio-ready.

In Methods of Investigating, I’ve come to appreciate the beauty of observing the mundane and paying attention to even the most obvious details, exploring what can emerge from them without prejudice, stereotyping, or prior knowledge.

Through Methods of Cataloguing, I’ve learned to rearrange what I thought I knew and see it in a new light, creating a fresh context. There are patterns that exist; we just have to be able to see them, name them, and sort them.

From Methods of Translating, I learned to focus and dive deep into content, extracting the most important aspects to see it from a new perspective. Pulling ideas, reading, and experimenting with approaches from references is also immensely helpful in strengthening a piece.

I have created projects with each of these methods that I had never done before. They develop and encourage creative and critical thinking, which then influences the outcome, whether it is commercial, political, or both.

In the city of images, shaped by society, value is measured by clarity. The rich ones stand in their stillness, sharp, preserved, untouched by time or people. They hang in white halls and speak only to those who can afford to listen. The poor ones wander through networks, reassembled and ragged at the edges, drifting on invisible currents that leap over walls, slip through borders, and forget the hands that sent them.

The poor image tells the story of its journey. It rises above measures of value, not in defiance but in quiet certainty, proud of the ruins that have made it whole. It is degraded and disregarded, yet its pride lies in what remains. It carries the memory of its first light, the circuits it has crossed, and the countless eyes that have passed over it. Though it loses its clarity, it gains something greater: its truth.

The early life of an image hangs on the hands that release it and the eyes that allow it to endure, but it soon slips from direct control. Some travel freely, unbound and radiant; others falter, lost in the buzz of the network, swallowed by the invisible hierarchy that determines what may be seen and what must fade. Beneath their passage lies the machinery of access and privilege, always turning its silent gears, unceasing, as images rise and fade.

In this constant motion, the poor image floats through networks, shared and appropriated, yet always vulnerable to erasure and manipulation. It weaves connections across distant spaces, provoking translation and misreading, and forming new publics beyond the reach of any single hand or institution. Low-resolution, fragmented, and detached from any source, it bears significance not in likeness, but in its existence, in its life, and in its reality.

This is why poor images will prevail.


References:

Steyerl, H., 2012. The wretched of the screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Calvino, I., 1974. Invisible Cities. Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company.