Video: Josh Turner & Allison Young "Crazy" - beautiful, professional voices that are fringed by casual interactions
In current culture, there is a tendency to include unscripted, rough edges of otherwise final, professional grade products. Audiences crave the personal, and we have certainly always been celebrity-obsessed, with the internet providing infinitely more information about intimacies of people's lives. I've reflected on this in photography staging--beautiful kitchen scenes of products, leaning in all the dust of the flour on the counter and a few spare berries. If we had the sculpted, final product, it would seem insincere. Therefore we leave the fringes in. Maybe given all the tech interface, this helps to make us feel warmer, more homey.
(Credit: https://flourandfloral.com/how-to-style-food-for-food-photography/)
None of us need fool ourselves that the "mess" has not been as carefully curated (really, more carefully curated) than the main event.
But something I read recently also made me wonder if there is a sense of protectiveness that we have that allows us to put this input into. It was an article about irony in our society.
An article, "How to Live without Irony," part of The Stone column in the NYT, Christy Wampole reflects on the hipster as an "archetype of ironic living." Ironic living allows one to dodge responsibility for his/her choices. It is a defensive, reactionary posture that acknowledges everything has already been done. Ironic living minimizes risk, since everything is a joke. It is a mantle to hide behind. These glasses, these large and ill-fitting clothes are clearly not meant to make me look more beautiful, clearly. So if you were wondering if I was beautiful, that's not even my intent. I mean, if you tell me I'm beautiful and somehow you've seen that beyond all this get-up, then I must be especially strikingly beautiful, because that's not what I'm going for.
Of the ironic, Wampole says: "It pre-emptively acknowledges its own failure to accomplish anything meaningful. No attack can be set against it, as it has already conquered itself."
I wonder what else this age of irony could be symptomatic of (inertia, bombardment with information, unwillingness to take risks, new ability to cultivate online presences?).
If we think these unscripted fringes allow us (allow us to see a person laugh, say something before or after a song), we should be aware that these "fringes" are no less carefully curated before broadcast to millions. I have been aware of this, posting on Instagram, including borders in my photography.
Wampole that irony is a luxury, and often harder to find among those who have suffered, and those in general less self-aware of culture (the very young and very old).
