Poor Pictures of the Earth
—Hito Steyerl, In Defense 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 shared with her things she’d never seen, and never will. Photographs. Pictures of ordinary things. Quiet, imperfect, scattered like half-remembered dreams, photocopies of photocopies. They’re part of the world I saw without her.
Becoming older than her feels like a slip of time, a sleight of hand, passing into a version of life she never reached.
I borrow Hito Steyerl’s phrase poor image1 for this collection, for the way our minds treat memories like a poor image: forever squeezing, compressing, and remixing them. They pass not through slow digital connections, but ageing neurons, where they’re yet further distorted, forming the stories we need to tell ourselves to get by.
These images, too, have been softened by time. My mum isn’t in the photographs. They’re not really about her. But they carry her absence. They mark time, my time, not hers. Two weeks in 2023, spent in Taiwan and Hong Kong’s outlying islands. Places I was when I wasn’t thinking about her, and places where I was.
The mum in my dreams is a figure my mind conjures. She’s a part of my subconscious, the part that’s still silently screaming into the void. In dreams, she steps out from behind the word mum, becoming more complete, more herself. Less of a maternal symbol and someone more whole, someone I’m still learning.
Here, she often ignores me. Not with hostility, but with a distance we both know we can’t traverse. Other times, we silently share the same space, strangers in a dentist’s waiting room. I’m not a child in these dreams. Not that forever-trapped ten-year-old. But I’m younger than I am now. When I wake, I leave those dreams behind, parked on the pillow.
The last time I saw her conscious was in the hospital. She was upset with me then. I was impatient to leave, the hospital being devoid of activities, save for witnessing the slow deterioration of its inhabitants. A few days after this visit, she was moved to intensive care. This would be the last time I saw her, now being kept alive by machines. The room was dark, its windows drawn. The illumination of machines bled through the blanketed dimness. Wearing a tired smile, a nurse asked me which football team I liked. Lying in the bed, the recesses of mum’s face were stark. The back of her hands bruised and bandaged, forever attached to drips and other machinery. Her hair had all but fallen out. I said goodbye. My uncle drove me home and I watched TV.
Often, when I sense her spirit, it’s because there’s a lightness in the air, a moment of levity, where someone might have said something funny, that’s the space I think she inhabits now—smiling at something amusing, laughing at a joke, filling these gaps with a humour only I know is there.
If I were to share anything with my mum, I would share a moment of lightness, perhaps not anything important, but something she might appreciate on some level, something that wouldn’t weigh her down: The exhilaration I felt as a teenager, finishing a shift at the restaurant, having asked a girl I liked out. The lightness I felt, the natural high, my question playing on repeat in my mind, her smile, walking to the tram stop, my feet with extra bounce, listening to Reflection Eternal on my metallic blue minidisc, buried in my pocket, also set to repeat. I’d have had a greasy red apron slung over my shoulder, been wearing a black collared t-shirt and jeans, smelled of grease, sweat, and pizza, had more than a few pimples, and undoubtedly, sported a bad haircut. The world from the upside of the seesaw.
A rare moment where I felt like I was moving toward something rather than away. Where I wasn’t just watching life happen but stepping into it. A poor picture, maybe. Imperfect and worn. But mine.
And I’d hold these images out to her, a gesture to say: This is the world I saw without you. And I wish that you could have seen it too.
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1 https://www.are.na/block/4641892, last accessed 16/05/2025