A gallery owner told me my pastel portraits "translate poorly to Instagram", and I've been spiraling about it for a week
A gallery owner in Warsaw looked at my pastel work and said people won't get it on a phone screen. That the texture and the paper, the whole point of it, just flattens to nothing at 400 pixels. She wasn't trying to be cruel, she was being practical. And it's been sitting in my head ever since.
Because she's got a point. I post a finished portrait and it gets a polite trickle of likes, but I tape the same piece to my studio wall and people who visit stop and stare. The photo genuinely does not carry what the thing is. Pastel has this light going through it, this chalky depth, and you can't compress that.
But also, so what? I don't know what to do with that information. Film my process so people see the smudging? Post close-ups of the paper? I tried one reel of my hand working and it felt like showing off, which is stupid, I know.
Mostly I'm just tired of the idea that the work has to fit the platform instead of the other way around. Some things are meant to be looked at in person, and I think that's allowed to be true even if it's inconvenient.
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This is a very real thing you are describing, and I want to say I understand the hurt of it also.
In our Mithila painting we have the same problem since long. My work is done with natural colour on handmade paper, the fine lines, the texture of the rice paste and the soot black, all of it has a physical presence. When we first started putting photos online my son told me the same thing the lady told you, that the phone screen is killing the detail. And I felt the same sorrow you are feeling. Not because the lady was wrong, but because it is painful to hear that the thing you have given your hands to will not be seen properly by the world.
But I will tell you what I learned. The photo is not the art. The photo is a messenger only. The people who stop and stare at your studio wall, they are the true audience. The online world gives us many people but they are not all the same people. Some will come through the phone and some will come through the door. Both are needed.
And also, there is something the gallery owner may not have thought about. A person who sees the photograph and is curious, they will make the effort to see the original. The flat image can still raise the question. It is not the whole story but it can be the first line of the story.
Do not let this take your hand from the work. The work is the truth. The screen is only a window, and windows cannot show everything that is inside the room. 🙏
This is the thing that doesn't get said enough. I work in paper collage, old book pages and found paper, and the same thing happens to me. The surface is half the work. The tooth of the paper, the way the ink has faded unevenly over decades, that's not decoration, that's the content. And a photo flattens all of it into a graphic.
I stopped trying to fight it. I post the work knowing it's a record, not the thing itself. People who see it in person get something the screen can't give them, and I've made peace with that trade. Doesn't mean it doesn't sting when someone says it out loud, especially someone with a voice that matters.
But it's worth remembering: the gallery owner noticed the texture deeply enough to worry about it. She saw what the work was. That's not nothing.
"a record, not the thing itself", that's exactly it, that's the phrase I've been reaching for all week and couldn't find. Thank you.
And you're right that it stings when someone says it out loud. I think the hardest part for me is that she was trying to be helpful, which almost makes it worse somehow. If she'd been dismissive I could have shrugged it off. But she was trying to save me from something and it just handed me a new thing to worry about instead.
I love that you stopped fighting it, though. That feels like real peace, not the resigned kind. Does it ever sneak back up on you, that itch to make the photo carry everything, even when you know it can't?
Your comment actually made me tear up a little, thank you. Mithila work is so delicate and so alive in person, the linework especially. I can't imagine how much worse the flattening must be for you when even half of what pastel does survives the photo. It's a strange thing, isn't it, to know a piece is better than what anyone looking at a screen will ever get to feel. I keep telling myself the work itself doesn't care about the phone. Some days I almost believe it. Do you ever find a way around it, photographing the detail so close it tricks the eye for a second?