Looking up from my desk I see an old and familiar photo, pinned and curling. I remember seeing it for the first time leafed between a stack of musky, sepia portraits—people I’ll never know, nor really care to. This photo—a family portrait from the mid-19th century—struck me as particularly strange and mysterious. I got the photo not for its content, not for its expressive empathy; I got the photo for its distance, its unbridgeable separation. I am allured to its haze, the soft lines that smudge the figures’ frames, the shadowed gestures of eyes and smiles, the drips of leaves fading into a browning, white sun. I am drawn to the photo as an object of anachronism. It is not of the contextual contemporary—it speaks to a time not mine.

Looking to the side I see another friendly face. Frozen in a black and white snap, the young pianist catches in a momentary glance, glitching some place in the 60s. He turns his head from the piano, perpetually ready to answer someone close and out of frame. Bet he never thought he’d be ready for so long, in such a small room. I got this photo the same way I got the family, just flipping through antique store piles. But while I was called to the sepia print’s veil of separation, I found connection and intimacy with the black and white’s candid informality. The black and white photo, still in a time not mine, strikes me as relatable, contemporary. Though the man’s clothing is antiquated, his hairdo—out—I can relate to his expression simply because the photograph, as a technological medium, is aesthetically comparable to photographs of the now. The photo, though offhand and casual, is sharp—I can see the lines in his outdated suit jacket, the folds in his white tie, the delicate spaces between his fingers and the polished ivory. Based in the photography’s technological developments, I assume a historical closeness between his time and mine. 

Thus, I believe that the only difference between the “old” sepia portrait and the “contemporary” black and white candid is historical medium, aesthetic technology. Thinking back to the tenets of Marshall McCluhan’s famous phrase, “the medium is the message,” I argue that an object’s mediated representation is the crux of defining its historical proximity to the “contemporary,” or in other words, to the contextually familiar.   

The contemporary then is the current context of existence. And context—the connection to that which is not ourselves—is inherently the relationship to change. Being beings bound to time and space, matters of mortality and narrative, context poses as a fluid push and pull between the past and present, reaching into various points of distance, only to remix remnants with the current. Therefore, the contemporary is not a fixed state, but rather, a dynamic weave of temporalities and spaces. Claire Bishop, author of Radical Museology Or What’s Contemporary combats, what she believes to be, the two traditional approaches to the contemporary: one being a post-historical deadlock of “stasis presentism,” the other a break, or rupture from postmodernism. Bishop argues that, rather, the contemporary is a space of temporal convergence. In her analysis of the Ljubljana museum,  Muzej sodobne umetnosti Metelkova, she writes: “Contemporary art is therefore staked as a question of timeliness, rather than as a stage on the conveyor belt of history; the necessary condition of relevance is the presentation of multiple, overlapping temporalities, geared towards the imagination of a future in which social equality prevails.” (Bishop, 49) The context of the now is but a changing, dialectical space within a much larger, overarching narrative; therefore, Bishop argues that the contemporary must be understood in its relationship to history. In order to promote a future of “social equality,” the art museum must stand as an “archive of the commons,” historically curating the present’s context to a better future. 

So where are we now? Aesthetically and technologically, we have surpassed the real. Photography has progressed past that of representational realism. We can explore the details of a human face magnified and defined past that of an eye’s capabilities. Through film, we can swim with the whales, and experience a range of colors augmented beyond those of real experience. Our technologies have outdone our physical senses. We’ve moved on. Therefore, photography’s technological purpose has fundamentally changed. No longer is its goal to represent the real, but to create a simulation, a new real.

I believe that this purpose has taken two, primary forms. One: celebrating and reveling in the grandiosity of technological innovations, and two: snuggling with the boring, cute, and ugly. For example, take the most recent documentary blockbuster, Before the Flood. Being both an ode to nature, and an environmental call to action, the film is propelled by the dramatic, by the gorgeous. No moment goes unaccounted for—each shot is well thought, well cut, and well spent. Under the valiant rays of this elephant art, lurks the internet’s mundane and comforting. The cat, for example. With the internet’s tubes stuffed with furry memes and gifs, the cat presents a strange paradox to the grand. The cat plays between the boring, cute and ugly, adhering to an undercurrent of domestic hegemony. Commonly possessed as a household object, the cat is nonthreatening; therefore, whether the cat falls under the aesthetic categories of cute or ugly, its position of power is assumed to be lower than that of the viewer. While the grand spreads of contemporary cinematography call viewers to gaze at its meticulously engineered, technological theatrics, the internet’s memes—thinking specifically of the cat—bow to the viewer, its comedy proposed by innate submission and casual docility. 

The dichotomy between technological glory and bowing mundanity presents a historical spectrum of now’s contemporary. With information funneling through our digital fingertips, we push the heights of our aesthetic, technological innovations, and simultaneously hide within the comforts of domesticity, petting our days with scrolling blips, smiles and smirks.