thomas rusch

"Digital Zen 2.0" Festival für Freunde, August 3rd-6th, 2023

In a small, tranquil room, a portrait setup is arranged. My counterpart dedicates approximately 20 minutes, providing a space for a moment of calmness, contemplation, and pause. We sit across from each other at a small table, gazing into each other's eyes for an uninterrupted 5 minutes. Following this, I briefly take the camera positioned between us and capture a single photo – an image capturing this conscious, intense, and intimate moment in our lives.

We are surrounded by an enormous endless stream of digital photos. In 2022, an estimated 1.5028 trillion photos were taken worldwide (1). With an estimated current global population of 7.95 billion (2), that averages to around 189 photos per person per year. Whether a baby or an elderly person, rich or poor, with or without a camera/phone. In 1922, there were approximately 0.9 billion photos taken (3) with a world population of about 1.9 billion people (4). On average, each person worldwide took 0.47 photos per year back then. In 1922, a photo was still something special. Analogue photography with films, development, and prints was expensive and required complex technical expertise that had to be learned. People thought about when and why a photo was taken. It was often a special moment in a person's life when a photo was captured. A baptism, a wedding, an anniversary, or a final photo before heading off to war. This photo would be framed, glued into an album, or carefully stored in a shoebox. Photography was already popular, but it remained a relatively rare and costly pleasure.

The digitization of photography has radically changed it since the 2000s. A photo now costs almost nothing. Almost everyone always has a device on them capable of quickly and easily capturing a technically excellent photo. Specialized knowledge is no longer necessary. Everyone takes photos of themselves and others everywhere and at all times. Every moment in life is documented, posted, liked, and forgotten. Photography, which has the ability to freeze a unique moment forever, has transformed into a vast stream of images, an excess of everything, from which a single image rarely stands out - a vast white noise. Yet, the issue is not digital technology itself but the possibility of inflationary, free usage and its constant overuse.

The portrait project "Digital Zen" aims to counteract this and to return to the original concept of photography in its content and procedure.

"Digital Zen 2.0" Festival für Freunde, August 3rd-6th, 2023

The portrait project "Digital Zen" aims to counteract this and to return to the original concept of photography in its content and procedure.