You see a lot of this sort of presentation of information about these days. I think it started with the Lomographic camera cult – this was a Russian camera built with Soviet era military optical technology, which was meant to produce pictures saturated with colour. I bought one but could never get it to do anything for me. The lomographers often present their images in walls of pictures. The outside of the Royal Festival Hall had a lomography wall for a while last year.
Although the camera was film, not digital, the method of presentation connected with the digigeist (I just made that word up, but isn’t it good!) and image walls are cropping up everywhere.
To me, the image wall represents the triumph of data over knowledge and appreciation. Presented like this, you really can’t focus on any one image. It is all flat, every image reduced to the same as its neighbour, no scope for selecting good from bad.
It is particularly sad to see the wall used to present record covers. The art of the record sleeve was all but killed by the advent of CDs; it still exists with 12 inch vinyl but the digital onslaught is mopping up the survivors. All that’s left is nostalgia. At least The Wire devotes a page each month to the depictiction and analysis of classic sleeves.
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