The gap between subjects’ investment and viewers’ indifference gives old photos their melancholy charge.

Evidence

The impersonal melancholy that Tiny Colour Movies produces is similar to the oddly wrenching affect you get from a website like Found Photos. It is precisely the decontextualised quality of these images, the fact that there is a discrepancy between the importance that the people in the photographs place upon what is happening and its complete irrelevance to us, which produces a charge that can be quietly overwhelming. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 361

Categorization

• XREF: This decontextualization-induced melancholy recurs throughout the hauntology tradition — echoes of the book’s own lost-future thesis and of the ‘old sunlight’ framing of Foxx’s work. — connects to: Image abundance paradoxically makes distant injustices feel less real. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 197; Decontextualized photographs charge us through the gap between others’ importance and our indifference; Super-affluent hedonism produces a pervasive melancholy about itself — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1306

Broader Connections

• Decontextualized photographs charge us through the gap between others’ importance and our indifference #corroborates (0.95)
• Image abundance paradoxically makes distant injustices feel less real. #expands (0.85) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 197
• Super-affluent hedonism produces a pervasive melancholy about itself #exemplifies (0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1306