Resolutions
We look for people using photography to explore other things, and then ask what this tells us about photography
Dead Pixels is a haphazard journal exploring the contested frontiers of visual culture and screen-mediated reality. We also collect and catalogue resources for users, makers and critics of photography.
Photography is in the middle of a radical change and the legacy photography industry is doing a bad job of explaining what the future might look like for photographers.
New opportunities surround us, debates around representation have never been more urgent or exciting, and photography continues to grow as a uniquely accessible form of expression. Large parts of the industry still trail behind, though, selling pay-for-exposure competitions and patronage schemes disguised as workshops, while clinging to outdated practices and business models.
That’s why we decided to start an initiative to connect practice with theory in this new reality. We cover traditional photography, of course, but we’re just as interested in hearing from radiologists, TikTok influences, algorithm designers or people affected by the growth in machine vision technology.
Every two weeks we produce a newsletter containing original work alongside links to projects and producers we find inspiring. We commission new work by theorists and makers from across the cultural industries and beyond, as well as sharing work we like or don’t. We encourage unsolicited pitches from anybody with something to say about photography. Expect short and long-form writing on the broad themes of photographs, photography and imaging technologies.
We also publish multimedia pieces including videos and podcasts, as well as interviews with people working in image-related fields, and occasional satire and memes. As photographic workers, we’re also interested in how the medium is adapting to new economic conditions and how creative workers are making a living in the age of the entreprecariat.
By broadening the discussion around photography to include more of the real applications of the medium, we hope to understand more of the medium’s work and workers, including non-human photographic processes. We love and value photography, and we stand for an inclusive, reflective and positive photographic industry.
If you’d like to write for us, please click the 'Submissions' button above or mail us on hello@deadpixels.online
Photography is dead- long live photography!
Why a Newsletter?
Before Facebook the internet worked a bit like this:
Browsers browsed, wiggling from site to site like Snake on the early levels and snacking on interesting things along the way. We found forums we would use more or less often, and there were sites where we liked to spend more time, but generally the internet was enjoyed in a linear fashion. Then the Zuckerverse arrived and now we use the internet like this:
The result is that pretty much anything which drops into your feed while you browse is the result of a tracking cookie snitching to an algorithm, which then tries to guess what it can show you next that might be the most monetisable.
That's where newsletters come in. We don't expect you to set DP as your homepage, or even save it in your favourites. We also don't expect readers to spend hours browsing the site, because that's not how the internet really works any more, nor do we expect aggregators to push traffic to our site unless we pay them (which we are not).
Instead we hope that, by sending you a newsletter every two weeks, we can show you some stuff you might want to see on our site, as well as some stuff on other sites too, placing us in the privileged role of Aggregator. This way we can help you escape the algorithm and make your internet diet a little more varied.