Author: Georgia Weston

The phrase “it was only supposed to be temporary” reverberates eerily throughout city planning offices, workplace break rooms, and immigration forums. After five years, no one can recall who said it or why anyone thought it. The pattern predates all bureaucracies. In a 2008 article for the Long Now Foundation, Stewart Brand put it simply: a quick hut becomes a house becomes a hotel, and a walkway becomes a road becomes a highway. When you consider that he was describing the architecture of contemporary civilization, the observation seems almost whimsical. The majority of what we consider bedrock began as a…

When a developer commissions a massive sculpture after spending millions on a public plaza, a certain kind of tension arises as the public votes with their feet and their rage. This unbreakable bind was symbolized by Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc. It was a 120-foot arc of weathered steel that cut across Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan in 1979, disrupting what had been a typical civic area and forcing pedestrians to take detours. It stood there like a rusted prophecy. After a protracted and intense public outcry, it vanished five years later. destroyed. Instead of enhancing a public plaza, the sculpture…

People used to have to cross the road to avoid Battersea’s railway underpass. It was the kind of area that a city learns to ignore; it was dilapidated, dimly lit, and sandwiched between pricey penthouses and council estates. Yinka Ilori painted it after that. People abruptly stopped, raised their heads, and sensed something. This change from avoidance to engagement, from gray neglect to something noteworthy, is not a coincidental aspect of his work. It’s the whole idea. Born in 1987 to Nigerian parents who had relocated to London in the mid-1980s, Ilori grew up in Islington, surrounded by color in…

A curator is the person who chooses what hangs where and why, and their name is typically displayed on the wall of any modern gallery. It’s a powerful name. It suggests a viewpoint and a series of decisions made fully conscious of what was being omitted. Open Instagram now. There, decisions have also been made by someone or something. The subjects echo each other, the colors are harmonious, and the rhythm of the pictures seems hazily deliberate. However, the wall bears no name. Only code is present. Researchers at Oxford’s Internet Institute have been discreetly investigating whether algorithms have assumed…

In the 2022 BBC3 documentary about Gerry Anderson, the producer of Thunderbirds, the director inserts a deepfake reconstruction of Anderson in which he speaks in his own voice and says things that he actually said. The director, Benjamin Field, stated, “I’m looking at deepfake as a way of telling the truth.” This statement has stuck in the minds of media scholars ever since. Depending on your point of view, that sentence is either a liberating statement or a minor catastrophe for the nonfiction genre. The relationship between the filmmaker and their subject is already complicated, and documentary filmmakers were among…

A certain type of moment has begun to occur everywhere—in cafés, waiting rooms, and common areas of universities. A person looks at their phone, locks the screen, nods slightly, and watches a 60-second video with visible captions but no sound. They just finished consuming what they perceive to be the news. The source was not a broadcaster. It was not from a verified correspondent with twenty years of experience in the field. It originated from a person sitting in a well-lit bedroom with a viewpoint they were confident enough not to challenge. It’s not exactly a media crisis. It’s more…

Near the fifteenth minute of nearly every high-profile documentary produced in the past five years, the formula becomes apparent. With a prime lens blowing out the background, a historian gazes slightly off-camera in a beautifully lit scene. Cut to a yellowed photo with a slow push-in. Play the strings. The reenactment begins, with an actor’s hand—never their face—picking up a phone, a knife, or a letter. It is capable. It has been polished. It’s also beginning to resemble wallpaper. Ed Sayer, a British producer, recently expressed what many in the industry have been whispering for some time: the craft of…

A photograph that has been subtly, almost courteously, altered by a machine contains a certain kind of silence. Sometimes it goes unnoticed at first. The light appears to be correct. The composition is sound. However, something has escaped the frame, and the picture continues to advance as if nothing had happened. What worries me the most about the current generation of AI image tools is that. They don’t make a big deal out of what they take out. They are neat. Jessica Smith, an Australian Paralympic swimmer, wrote earlier this year about using an AI to create a self-portrait. She…

The majority of photographers I’ve spoken to over the years acknowledge—sometimes with a hint of sheepishness—that they mastered the ability to see a frame’s center long before they mastered its edges. Really, it’s an odd habit. Everything in the picture’s periphery is regarded as background noise, and the center draws you in like gravity. However, an image’s edges—those subdued four lines surrounding it—often determine whether it feels roomy or claustrophobic. More experienced shooters believe that this is where the true craft resides. Within the first five minutes of any camera club meeting, you will hear someone bring up the rule…

In any creative or professional life, there comes a time when the thing you’ve created begins to beg to be left alone. Even if you are unable to identify it, you can sense it. The company has its own pulse, the painting is finished, and the report is filed, but the hands that created it continue to hover, adjust, and second-guess. It turns out that one of the most difficult physical actions a person can perform is walking away. In 1974, Marina Abramović realized this as she stood motionless in a gallery in Naples while strangers cut her clothing, stabbed…