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Luxury stock images

Luxury stock images

In search of lost novelty.

24 Jul

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Unlocked from the Dirt archive. Colleen Kelsey on a certain moodboard motif.

In adolescence I moved between plastered and papered surfaces, always clipping, tearing, printing, pasting images. The categories were typical and banal: Musicians and writers and movie stars, dead or alive. Reproductions of art; models on sets; fashion slouching down a runway. There was joy in “finding things,” a visceral pull to what caught the eye, my mind adrift in a succession of liminal fantasies. Years later, I would read artist Moyra Davey’s Index Cards and think about those rectangles flanked by modulated columns of text, soon to be removed from the page. She writes, “There is a seduction to the editorial use of photographs: surround any image with type and it takes on an allure, an authority, provokes a desire it might otherwise not have.” My behavior wasn't so much fandom, it was an intoxicant.

That habit soon migrated to the digital sphere, where blogs, then Tumblr, served as aggregators for discovery, images delivered from the void. In the nascent days of Instagram, I followed friends and public figures, but also a crop of accounts you could say were purveyors of “mood,” posting archival fashion, interiors, and aesthetic content, before the word “content” subsumed all user output and “aesthetic” denoted a genre or a lifestyle. What I was doing all along, unconsciously and then very consciously, was moodboarding.

Vibe construction might just be the most self-gratifying leisure pursuit of our time. It’s impossible to pinpoint when we first started creating stage sets reconfiguring our own lives and tastes, but image-focused apps have both intensified the practice and made it extremely casual. Though I’ve told myself to ignore my own screen time report data, I’m curious how many images I’ve processed in the last week (total: 12 hours, 27 minutes), how many I’ve found to be worthy of note, and how many I’ve chosen to rerelease into the ether.