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; now 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. The paintings will also transpose the crude digital aesthetic of these images, as baked in by the technical limitations of early consumer-level digital photography (flip-phone cameras and compact digital cameras) synonymous with this era; lens aberrations, red eye, low light noise distortion, highlight clipping, server compression and low resolution.

This finite era of naive user-driven image sharing, turbo charged by ‘tagging’ as a new form of social commutations utility, represents a technological step change that would rapidly shift our online digital literacy, forever altering 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 low-value images sit amassed on Facebook's servers, forgotten and with no application. By drawing on a hybrid of photorealism and hyperrealism painting styles, blended with formalist aspects of Classical Realism, 17th century Dutch Golden Age painters and 18th century Neo-Impressionists, the archival value of these disposable digital images is highlighted to reveal something peculiarly authentic and unretrievable.

Image credit: Henry Whitehead, Lucida Studio