‘Social Realism’ periodises a finite chapter where early digital photography collided with the birth of social networks, specifically Facebook, from the mid-to-late 2000’s. With the novel ability to “tag” people in images, this nascent era is typified by users who would upload - with careless abandon - large swathes of un-curated “low value” images; unthinkable relative to contemporary uses of social media, geared towards image perfection, commodification and hyper-curated personal branding.

As a series of paintings, this on-going project draws upon low-value images from Facebook’s public and private archive - a mix of strangers and friends - that are suitably unremarkable, often accidental, and with little to no compositional merit. Of crucial intent, these paintings transpose the source image’s crude digital aesthetic, or “malfunctions”, as baked in by the technical limitations of early consumer-level digital photography (flip-phone cameras and compact digital cameras) synonymous with this era; low light noise, lens aberrations, red eye, highlight clipping, low resolution and server compression.

This finite era of naive user-driven image sharing, turbocharged by “tagging” as a new social communications utility, represents an epoch that forever altered how we represent ourselves and attribute value to images, particularly images of people. Today, awash with ubiquitously perfect imagery and high digital literacy as the new norm, millions of these 2000s low-value images remain amassed on Facebook's servers, forgotten and with no application. As a compelled re-contextualisation of figurative painting techniques and materiality, Social Realism highlights the archival nature of these disposable images to reveal something peculiarly authentic and unretrievable.

‘A Nostalgia for the Future’, an essay written by Richard King is available to read here.

“Rendered and retouched in oils, they speak to a time before our lives were sucked into the reputational economy of likes, retweets and followers; a time before the mask of social media began to eat the face beneath. It is no coincidence (though it may be unintended) that nearly all of them show young adults at play… with the promise of joyful sociability. No one in these paintings has an ‘Instagram face’; no one is signalling wealth or virtue. The images are a record of (embodied) conviviality.”

Richard King is an author and critic based in Fremantle, WA. He is the author of On Offence: The Politics of Indignation (Scribe Publishing, 2013), Here Be Monsters: Is Technology Reducing Our Humanity? (Monash University Publishing, 2023) and Brave New Wild: Can Technology Save the Planet? (Monash University Publishing, 2025). He can be found at his website bloodycrossroads.com.

Image credit: Lucida Studio