In one of Woody Allen’s films the main character is out of focus. Shoveling pirated DVDs in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, China, April 20, 2008. Poor images show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable-that is, if we can still manage to decipher it. They spread pleasure or death threats, conspiracy theories or bootlegs, resistance or stultification. Poor images are dragged around the globe as commodities or their effigies, as gifts or as bounty. They testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images-their acceleration and circulation within the vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism. Poor images are the contemporary Wretched of the Screen, the debris of audiovisual production, the trash that washes up on the digital economies’ shores. Only digital technology could produce such a dilapidated image in the first place. Not only is it often degraded to the point of being just a hurried blur, one even doubts whether it could be called an image at all. It mocks the promises of digital technology. It is passed on as a lure, a decoy, an index, or as a reminder of its former visual self. It often defies patrimony, national culture, or indeed copyright. Its filenames are deliberately misspelled. The poor image is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image. The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming. The image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction. The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. The poor image is a rag or a rip an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard.
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