Against the Algorithm

The complaint is now familiar enough to be boring: the platforms that made photography visible have stopped being interested in photographs. What is less discussed is what photographers actually lose when reach becomes the measure of a picture.

The cost of optimising

A photographer who publishes for an algorithm learns, quickly, which frames travel. High contrast travels. Faces travel. Saturation travels. Quiet work does not, and so quiet work stops being made — or gets made and never shown, which amounts to nearly the same thing.

A picture that needs thirty seconds cannot survive a surface that gives it one.

Curation is not nostalgia for gatekeeping. It is simply a different promise: that someone looked, that the sequence was considered, and that being placed next to good work is itself a form of recognition.

The photographers who thrive here are not the most prolific. They are the ones with a point of view stubborn enough to survive being unpopular for a while.