I should have seen it coming. The jpeg, pixellated look is now fashionable. My source on what is worth paying attention to is the Style section of the Sunday paper. This is my dark secret—I adore the Style section of the New York Times. It’s my first read after the A pages. I read it before I read Doonesbury in the Seattle paper. A life goal, yet to be achieved, is to have taken the photograph featured in the Vows section.
On the inside spread of the cover story, on the dumpster chic style of Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, is a hugely enlarged paparazzi shot of our subjects, in this generation’s take on the Annie Hall motif, crossing a street. The resolution, generously, might be 25 dpi. You can barely make out the faces. There are sharpened pixels around the legs, compression pixels in the smooth tones. It might have been taken on a phone, but there’s an agency credit underneath (Eibinder/Bauer-Griffin).
This is how photographs look now. I guess we should get used to it.
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