My love for you was never real

Charlotte Helwig's search for the truth of virtual connections

"It's like swimming in a big ocean, but with your eyes," is how photo editor Emily Keegin describes the feeling of navigating the ubiquity of photography in contemporary culture in an episode of Gem Fletcher's "The Messy Truth" podcast. We all know how much this has to do with the internet - we're familiar with the idea of "floods of images" - but I have to say that I don't like that term because of its negativity. It describes an overload, whereas Keegin's description also speaks to the fascination and wonder that comes from not wanting to stop looking because there's so much to see in the world. What is it like to become a photographer in this image culture - how does it change our idea of narrative, composition, attention?

After talking almost exclusively about AI in photography for the last few weeks, I want to share something different with you today. Earlier this month, the photography exhibition Gute Aussichten opened here in Hamburg, a showcase for emerging photographers curated by Josefine Raab and Stefan Becht. This year's exhibition features a work that I think is also interesting for dots per inch: "My love for you was never real" by Charlotte Helwig, who recently graduated from the University of Applied Sciences in Bielefeld. Her work is a reflection on the image worlds of social media and the role that photography and photographic staging play in it. I am convinced that the way we have become accustomed to photographic staging as a form of creating reality profoundly influences our idea of authenticity in images and what constitutes truth in both the physical and virtual world. I wrote about Charlotte Helwig's work for the Gute Aussichten catalog and would like to share the text with you here. If you have any thoughts on the subject, I'd love to read them in the comments.

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"As the first group to fully come of age with smartphones and social media, Gen Z formed an understanding of the world in which the boundaries between the digital and real were blurred. Every experience was a potential cyber-palimpsest of self-documentation, and reaction, and reaction to the reactions … this new generation embraced a voyeuristic digital vérité." - Cal Newport

A young woman stands facing away from the viewer, wearing headphones and VR goggles, completely enclosed in the digital world. We see a bodybuilder, her manicured hands, no face to personalize the surreal, steeled body. Two people hold each other by the shoulders, but it's not clear if they're holding on or pushing each other away. A sexy dripping orchid, a nasty insult on the grass in front of a mansion, an explosion, a glass falling from a table, a person falling into the empty sky. Precise, almost commercial studio shots next to warm, noisy daylight shots and still lifes.

Installation view of "My love for you was never real", 2022

"My love for you was never real" is a series of single images, a feed without beginning or end, not ordered by time, but spread across the wall. Each image is a small, self-contained narrative. Each scene stands on its own, just as the people depicted are self-contained. While everything is available simultaneously, nothing is really connected. Formally and structurally, the work resembles a home feed, that stream of professional and personal photos, advertisements, influencers, news, as we encounter it on social media.

Born in Berlin in 1996, Charlotte Helwig belongs to a generation of young photographers who have grown up with Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, and for whom social media is part of an extended reality. The boundary between the real and the digital world seems hard to define when love, friendships and interests always take place in both worlds or move fluidly between them.

Helwig analyzes the digital theater of fabricating identity on Instagram and how it mirrors our realities and makes our desires visible. Each image is a tableau, carefully considered in relation to one of the themes or emotions she encounters daily on the platform. The images are meditations on the unsatisfying feeling of eternal interminability, the uncertainties of digital friendship, the instability, hypersexualization, and the unfiltered hate of cybermobbing. The work speaks of a longing for real connections; it is a confession of a false, superficial, vain love.

The central question of the piece is the relationship of Instagram to staging in photography. It points to the fact that social media photography abandoned the ideals of documentary photography at a very early stage. When the photo platform launched in 2010, the idea of the authenticity of personal snapshots was already embedded in a "manufactured nostalgia," as Australian authors Lachlan MacDowall and Kylie Budge write:

„Filters work to enhance a mediocre photograph and lift its appeal in the visually oriented, attention-seeking environment that defines much of current-day digital visual culture and especially Instagram. Algorithm designed imperfections (vintage filters, film scratches, polarization effects) become perfection itself: our food suddenly looks more delicious, our clothes more stylish, our interiors more editorial, our skin blemish-less, our bodies more desirable”.

This trend intensified when Instagram was acquired by Facebook in 2012: advertising infiltrated feeds, and a new, professionalized generation of users and their lifestyles merged with the marketing interests of corporations. The platform created a new generation for whom every documented and shared moment generated potential social or financial capital and established self-staging in photography as a primary mode of communicating interests and identities.

The visual realms created in this way, according to Helwig, are "exaggerated stagings of reality for feedback and reaction". They allow and anticipate a performative form of ourselves, producing a "non-stop advertisement in which private opinion and advertising merge into a convoluted tableau."

Helwig's work draws on the aesthetics of contemporary fashion photography in which staging has played an important role in recent years. This approach does not reference the extravagant and prohibitively expensive glamour of a David LaChapelle or Annie Leibovitz, but instead works with a subtle or overt irony that combines high and low, the mundane and the elegant, the ugly and the beautiful to create something reminiscent of photonovel narratives.

Other motifs in Helwig's work draw on the nostalgia of a Ryan McGinley-esque lifestyle photography that has influenced our perception of authenticity and spontaneity since the beginning of the new millennium: seemingly casual scenes of young people in nature that, upon closer inspection, reveal themselves to be carefully orchestrated shots meant to illustrate the freedom and unfettered emotions of youth.

There are also visible allusions to how social media has changed photography compositionally: Helwig does not shoot complex long shots - her images are not detailed social studies like those staged by the old masters of the print generation. On the contrary, each image focuses on one object, the distances are rather close, the compositions clear, and the communication can be grasped in fractions of a second - optimized for small screens and short attention spans.

Writing in 1998, Italian sociologist Elena Esposito observed that the virtual is diametrically opposed to the difference between truth and fiction. Its purpose is not to create "false real objects" but "true virtual objects", for which the question of true reality is completely irrelevant. The opportunity of the virtual, Esposito argues, lies in the viewer's awareness that "the reality he is dealing with depends on his interventions and does not exist independently." The virtual makes it easy to participate in the construction of the real.

Seen from this perspective "My love for you was never real", speaks of real loneliness in social media, but it dissolves as the desire to forge new connections takes center stage. For Helwig, her work is not just a critique of social media. Rather, the photographer uses Instagram to go beyond Instagram. The platform is the starting point that gives her the ideas for her motifs, but it is also a tool for realizing the work: she finds her protagonists, teams, and many of the locations on Instagram. She contacts them on the platform and creates sets in the Berlin area, meeting people she would never have met without Instagram: a bodybuilder, stuntmen, models, couples and stylists. Each image is staged, but a real encounter, a "real virtual object", embracing the digital vérité.

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Dive deeper:

You can see more of Charlotte Helwig’s work here and on instagram

Gute Aussichten - New German Photography exhibition runs until Sep 24 at Deichtorhallen, Hamburg

Photography graduates can already apply for Gute Aussichten 2023/24 here

Charlotte Helwig pointed me to the publication series "digital image cultures" with individual books about filters, memes, body image, censorship, etc. The books are available in German and can be ordered here.