"Nice Shot"

I follow a few photography and imagery accounts on Twitter, and scrolling past this image mashup (above) I kind of skidded to a halt at the first comment:

'Nice Shot'. I mean - it's not. It's not a shot. It's a heavily edited combination of images that together make for an arresting result. If this was a real shot then I'm pretty sure the Civil Aviation authorities would be having a word with the airline, the pilot would be looking for a new line of work and the cubicle-dwellers of those office blocks would be wtf-ing all over social media. If it was a real shot, it would be incredible. I mean, it is incredible, as in... not credible.

Of course it's not a real photograph. It was probably never intended to be, just someone having fun. When you look closely, it's so heavily edited that none of it really makes any sense. A quick peek at Google Lens shows that it's a bit of a trope, too. A bit clichéd, even.

But at a glance, on a small screen, wow. It ticks the boxes for me: A 747, Clouds, Architecture, a dark murky aesthetic that somehow appeals. Instantly, oooh. For the apparently-jaded tweeter above, it was worth taking the time to reply "Nice Shot". I get it.

It got me thinking, though, about how we are so constantly bombarded with breathtaking imagery that it just washes over us. I was looking at the fantastic imagery from NASA's Juno Mission with coffee this morning. These stunning images are hot off a spaceship some 628 million km away and show features and details of a moon orbiting Jupiter, details we've never seen before. I'm here munching on a piece of toast, thinking, 'hmmm, these are nice'. Not "Holy Shit' or 'Oh My God' but 'Hmm. Nice'.

The Europa moon pictures are science, of course, arguably not art. It's a record of reality without creativity, shot by a space robot. Yes, someone processed the image before it hit my retinas, but essentially it's just a record. Still breathtaking, still thought-provoking and full of meaning, but not art.

The problem comes when something truly artful zips by without comprehension. When you see a photograph that is taken with care (and not ridiculously over-edited) there's so much more to see than just the image. Of course there's the photographers intent - the vision they have seen. There's composition, subtlety, context, their artistic interpretation. But occasionally there's also something else - a magical x-factor that unveils itself when you are truly present.

Are we desensitised to beauty? I don't think so, but maybe we need to consciously choose when we see it, to really see it. It takes an effort of will to really look at something, we're so used to images blipping past us every few seconds that we see without seeing. You need to slow. To stop.
Breathe. See. Think. See again.

There's a real danger of missing the beauty that's out there, as it scrolls past your eyeballs at a hundred images per minute. Of course there isn't time to see them all more slowly, and many of them aren't worth the effort anyway; the Aeroplane and Buildings 'Nice Shot' is just banality, when you look. But the nuggets are in there elsewhere and I'm going to try and see them, to slide to a halt and stop and see.