Poor Pictures of the Earth
—Hito Steyerl, In Defence of the Poor Image
2023
Compiled in 2025
Photography (B/W), Text
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The day I became older than my mum, I wanted to share with her things she’d never seen—and never would. Photographs. Pictures of ordinary things. Quiet, scattered like half-remembered dreams. Fragments of the world I saw without her.
That time marked a kind of threshold for me. A time of re-evaluation, contemplating how I wanted to spend my time, what mattered, and what didn’t. Typically, I spent it walking—around Taipei and Hong Kong’s outlying islands—because sometimes, movement is the only thing that helps. The photographs I took during that period were shaped by that motion. But what they hold is stillness. A quietness I couldn’t access at the time. Only lean towards and see after.
For this collection, I borrow and adapt Hito Steyerl’s term, poor image,2 a concept the artist and theorist uses to describe low-resolution, degraded visuals circulating online. I use ‘poor picture’ to infer how our minds treat memory. Steyerl’s poor image is forever squeezed, compressed, and distorted through digital connections; ‘it is a visual idea in its very becoming’.3 Our mind treats memories in much the same way. Our recollections do not pass through fibre-optic cables but through ageing neurons, distorting further and becoming the stories we tell ourselves to get by.
These photographs, too, have been softened by time. I kept returning to them. They were quiet, a gathering space for my mind’s small ghosts.
The mum in my dreams is a ghost, something my mind conjures. A part of me, still ten years old, stays hovering in that quiet distance between us, always close, never near. When I wake, I leave those dreams behind, parked on the pillow.
The last time I saw her conscious was in the hospital. She had her own room by this stage. The mood had darkened. She was upset with me then; I was impatient to finish the visit, and her room offered nothing save for the slow deterioration of its inhabitant. A few days later, her condition worsened. I was woken early and rushed to the hospital. Now she was in intensive care, in a coma, kept alive by machines. Monitor lights bled through the blanketed dimness. A worn-out nurse smiled and asked me which football team I liked.
My mum’s face had hollowed. The back of her hands were bruised and bandaged, still attached to drips and wires. Her hair had all but fallen out. I said goodbye to her then, not to the person, but to what remained. My uncle drove us home. I watched TV.
If I were to share anything with my mum, I would share a moment of lightness—perhaps not something important, but something that might make her smile, something that wouldn’t weigh her down.
A quiet happiness.
Finishing a Friday night shift—
I didn’t sneak into the walk-in freezer for gelati—
I lingered in L’s smile instead.
Teenagers working part-time jobs at a pizza place—
music looped in my ears as I walked to the tram stop afterwards—
and her smile looped with it.
Mini Disc whirring in my pocket—
each track painstakingly recorded and T-marked.
A red apron slung over my shoulder.
Black-collared shirt.
Black Levi’s.
The aroma of grease and pizza kept me company—
as I waited for the tram back down Cotham Road.
All set to sit in a dark living room—
eat cold pizza from the box,
and watch Rage—
hours of early morning music videos—
flicker quietly across the TV screen.
I’d have had more than a few pimples,
and undoubtedly sported a bad haircut.
The world from the upside of the seesaw.
A poor picture, maybe. Imperfect and worn. But one I still carry.
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Footnotes:
1 https://www.are.na/block/4641892, last accessed 16/05/2025
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.