I. “Un Art Moyen”, An Average Art
Some of my generation keep a family album, its colors shifting now toward, the faces of the nineteen seventies fading into the cotton paper they were printed on. I was born in 1975, so the earliest of those pictures were taken by others, for me, before I could hold a camera or judge what was worth keeping. They were made by parents and relatives and then handed down, an inheritance as much as a record. What strikes me, looking at mine, is how few pictures there are, and how much each one endured to get to its sleeve. A photograph then was work. You had a roll of twenty-four or thirty-six frames and no way to see what you had caught, so you framed the shot carefully, held the camera steady, waited for the light, and spent one of your small stock of exposures on it. Then you waited again, days or weeks, carried the film to be developed, paid for the prints, and only at the end, with the envelope open on the table, did the real decision come which of these was good enough, which mattered enough, to be fixed into the album and kept. Most did not make it. The album was never a record of everything that happened. It was a verdict on what deserved to last.
The album’s choosing was someone else’s, handed down to me.
My own work, I thought, I had chosen freely until I first came across Bourdieu’s essay as a young photographer. Ghassan Hage, an anthropologist and a relative of mine, suggested it after seeing some of my work, photographs of graffiti in war-torn Lebanon and life in the souks of Damascus. I had taken that work to be mine, a private way of seeing, my art. Bourdieu’s essay “Un art moyen” made that harder to believe, and it did so very early, in Sydney in 1995.
What unsettled me was where the book had come from. It was not a photographer’s manifesto but a piece of sociology, and the industry itself had paid for it. In the early nineteen sixties Kodak-Pathé, the French arm of the company whose whole business was getting ordinary people to buy film and press a button, asked a group of sociologists to find out how the French actually used their cameras. Pierre Bourdieu led the work, with Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel and Jean-Claude Chamboredon, and the surveys ran from 1961 to 1964. The result, published by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1965, was not the marketing report a film company might have wanted. It was almost the opposite. It showed that the free, personal, spontaneous act the company was selling was one of the most tightly governed things people did.
The title is already the argument. “Un Art Moyen” is usually translated as a Middle-brow Art, but the French says more: an average art, an art of the middle, a practice that sits below the respected forms. Painting and music grant status precisely because they are hard, because they demand years of training most people will never do. Photography demands nothing. Anyone can own a camera, and the more automatic the camera, the more people like it. You would expect an activity with no rules and no tradition to be a free-for-all. Bourdieu found the reverse. There is nothing, he wrote, more regulated and conventional than amateur photography. The moments people choose to photograph, the things and faces they judge worth a picture, the poses, even the way the shot is framed, all follow unspoken rules that almost no one is taught and almost everyone obeys.
Three ideas run through all of Bourdieu’s work. Only the first is fully present in this early book. The other two he built later and reading them back into the family album is what lets it open onto everything that followed. The first is “l’habitus”. The dispositions we take from our place in the world, the tastes and reflexes that feel like instinct and are really class turned into second nature. It decides that one moment calls for a photograph and another does not. The second is “le capital”, which Bourdieu widened past money to any resource that gives an advantage: cultural capital, the ease handed down at home; social capital, the useful people you know; symbolic capital, prestige. The third is “le champ”, the field, the arena where a given capital is fought over, traded, each with its rules. A person acts as a habitus carrying some capital, inside a field. In 1965, photography is habitus in the act of forming.
Seen this way, it is not the individual eye that decides when to shoot. It is the habitus of the group. More than two thirds of photographers, Bourdieu found, were what he called seasonal conformists, people who took pictures only at family gatherings or on the summer holidays. Cameras turned up mostly in households with children and were usually owned by the family rather than by a person. Photography, he wrote, exists mainly by virtue of its family function: to mark and preserve the high points of family life, and by doing so to hold the family together and remind it of its own unity. The family photograph is a small domestic ritual in which the family both performs and worships itself, and the urge to take the picture is strongest at exactly the moment the group is most together.
The wedding is where capital and field come into view. Following Durkheim, Bourdieu treated the celebration as the way a group renews itself, and the photograph as the object that fixes the moment it does so. Here the picture is prestige made solid. In the villages he studied the wedding photograph was compulsory, a gift folded into the exchanges the wedding set off, and to refuse to buy one was to insult your hosts and be marked as a cheapskate. In ceremonies, the family and the close social circle are the field, and the professional photographer is its priest, a photographic priest whose presence alone can sanction the rite, a role no amateur guest could take however good their pictures. The priest is for the exceptional day.
The rest of the time the camera stayed in the drawer, and the hand that reached for it was usually the mother’s. That she should be the one photographing looked like nature, something a mother simply did. Kodak did not learn this habit from Bourdieu. It had been casting the mother as the family’s keeper of memories since the eighteen-eighties, long before any sociologist arrived to describe her. What the company paid for in the nineteen sixties was, in effect, a mirror, a study of the very habit its own advertising had spent seventy years building. Which means the reflex behind the camera was never quite the group’s own, even in 1965. Part of it was already being written in Rochester, New York, at the headquarters of Kodak.
What Kodak had funded was a theory in which the person holding the camera is barely the author. The picture does not record a private vision. The habitus of the group acts through a single hand. Bourdieu called the photograph a choice that praises, but the choice belongs to the group, which has already decided what deserves praise. Hold on to what is still solid here, because it will not stay solid. The thing photographed is real. The occasion is real. The group is there, in the room, celebrating itself. Everything that follows is the slow loosening of those three certainties, and with them the habitus, capital and field they held in place.
II. From the Drawer to the Hand
Up until lately, the camera used to live in a drawer. It came out for the birthday and the holiday and went back in, which is another way of saying the occasion owned the camera. The smartphone ended that. Apple put a working camera in the phone in 2007 and a lens on the front in 2010, and Instagram arrived the same year to catch whatever the lens produced. Now the camera never leaves the hand. Everyone has become an average Henri Cartier-Bresson, permanently armed for the decisive moment and taking it so constantly that no moment is decisive anymore. Close to two trillion photographs are taken every year, about ninety-four in every hundred on phones, which works out at roughly sixty thousand a second. Bourdieu’s seasonal conformist, who reached for the camera twice a year, has become a full-time producer of pictures of a life that no longer has seasons.
The habitus is the first thing to move. It does not weaken; it changes what it points at. The reflex no longer fires only at the big moments of family life, because the big moment has dissolved. Everything is now photographable, the meal, the feet, the mirror, the sky at the end of an ordinary day, and the rule behind the shot is no longer that a moment deserves to be marked but that a moment could be content. The sense of what is worth a photograph has not vanished. It has just moved from the exceptional to the feed.
The sharpest change is in the capital. Bourdieu’s villagers built up prestige slowly and locally, and the wedding photograph was a piece of standing they could hold in their hands, praised inside a group that knew them. The smartphone made that prestige countable, portable and public. Recognition is now measured, in likes and followers and views, and it moves among strangers rather than neighbours. The cultural capital of the good eye, once almost a monopoly of the professional, the artist, is first handed to everyone and then sorted again around a new figure, the influencer, whose whole job is turning pictures into recognition and recognition into money. Photography becomes, openly, a way of getting rich or trying to.
And the field is no longer the family. The real social circle that once blessed the picture, and the professional who ran the ritual, are pushed aside by the platform and its feed. The group whose unity the photograph confirms is no longer in the room. It is an audience, mostly strangers, gathered and ranked by software that decides what spreads and what sinks. The priest has not been replaced by another priest but by an algorithmic distribution system. The selfie finishes the move: where the family was once both the worshipper and the thing worshipped, now the individual is both, performing their belonging to a group that is not there.
This is not only a loss. The same shift broke a monopoly. The trained eye the professional guarded was handed to everyone, including people never allowed to hold it. The phone that fills the feed with nothing is also the phone that records the demolition, the checkpoint, the killing. A witness in every pocket has changed who gets believed. The gain is real, and it runs the other way, against the enclosure, on the same device that built it.
What survives all this is exactly what Bourdieu said would survive: the function. The photograph still marks some moment, still binds people together even if for a split-second swipe, still lets the person tell the group who they are. But the family has become the audience, the occasion the feed, the priest the algorithm, and the slow local standing of the wedding portrait a public score. The smartphone was sold, more than any camera before it, as the freeing of the individual eye. However, what it mostly delivered was a habitus increasingly written by the platform, a capital counted in the platform’s currency, and a field the platform owns and ranks. Ownership of the ritual has moved from the family to the platform. For now, one certainty is still standing. There is still something real in front of the lens. That is the last thing the final stage takes away.
III. From the Hand to the Mind, the Image Without a Referent
The last stage begins with the face, because the face is where the real thing first comes apart. The filter does not touch up the picture after the shot; it rewrites the face before anyone has seen the original. In 2019 the writer Jia Tolentino gave the result a name, Instagram face: one look, the same lips and cheekbones and cat eyes, worn by faces that started out different. By 2023 TikTok’s Bold Glamour filter was reshaping jaw and nose and eyes live, so smoothly that you could no longer tell the edited face from the real one, and it was used more than four hundred million times. Surgeons had already begun seeing patients who wanted to be made to look like their own filtered selfies, a complaint that picked up the name Snapchat dysmorphia. The picture and the thing it shows have traded places. The photograph no longer points back to the face that was there. The face is now asked to catch up with the photograph.
This finishes something in the habitus. Bourdieu’s dispositions were absorbed slowly, over a childhood, from family and class. The filter installs them in an afternoon. The sense of what a face should look like, or a room, or a meal, or a body, is now produced by the platform and taken in within weeks, and it converges, because the machine is aiming at a single learned average. The choice that praises is still made, but it is written in advance. What praises through the individual is no longer the taste of a group they belong to but the look of a system that has trained them.
Bourdieu had already dismantled the myth of the camera as neutral witness. In 1965 he quoted the common claim that the photographic plate does not interpret, it records, “la plaque photographique, elle n’interprète pas, elle enregistre”, and showed it for what it was, a false innocence. Every photograph is already a selection, a single vantage point, an instant cut from duration, black and white standing in for colour. There was never a pure transcription to lose. What survived that early demolition was smaller and harder than innocence, the plain fact that a selection had been made from something. Someone stood somewhere and chose what to leave out. That is the certainty the algorithm now removes. Not neutrality, which was already dead by 1965. The existence of a world to select from at all.
Then the real thing goes altogether. With AI, the generated image needs no face, no light, no afternoon, nothing that was ever in front of a lens, because there was no lens. Since 2022 a sentence has been enough to produce a “photograph” of an event that never happened, a person who never lived, a place that is nowhere. Bourdieu’s whole account rested on the quiet certainty that someone had once stood there. That certainty is now optional, and the strange part is how little the ritual seems to notice.
I think here of the walls I photographed as a young man, the graffiti in post-war Beirut and the life weaving through the Damascus souks. Whatever else those pictures were, they were the trace of a hand, the trace of a life. Someone had stood at that wall, in that city, and left a mark; a young girl looked into my lens and registered, non-negotiably, on my Kodak film; and my photographs were a witness to those traces, and both ends were real. The AI generated image cuts both. There is no hand, no wall, no person, no place, no one who stood anywhere. It is the first kind of picture in the history of the medium that is the trace of nothing.
So let us stop calling it a photograph. A photograph is a trace; this is its opposite, built to resemble it, an image with the grammar of evidence and none of the fact. It needs its own name. Call it a simulograph, a likeness with no original behind it. Add a single letter, a t, and simulograph becomes stimulograph, which seems to be the sole purpose. It refers to nothing, and it exists to provoke, the desire, the surgery, the click. One letter holds the distance between what the picture is and what it is for. The risk was never that any single fake would fool us. It is that once the counterfeit and the coin go by the same name, the name stops meaning what it meant, and the photograph surrenders the one objective property that set it apart from every other kind of picture, that the world caused it.
The capital outlives the thing it was about. Lil Miquela, a person who does not exist, carries around three million followers and was once named by Time among the most influential people on the internet. The recognition is real, the money is real, the thing referred to is nothing. Prestige, already turned into a number by the smartphone, is now fully cut off from anything having been the case. You can build a reputation on a face that is not yours, a trip you never took, a self that was generated. What once took a studio, a team and a budget to fabricate now takes a sentence.
And the field passes to the model. The real social circle blessed the wedding photograph; the platform ranked the feed; now the arena is run by systems that both make the images and decide which get seen, whose rules are hidden even from the people competing inside them, and which reward looking like the average the system itself produces. The priest became a distribution system, and the distribution system has become the author. Ownership of the ritual has moved from the family to the platform to the model.
IV. When the Arrow Reverses
Look back, and the three movements are the loss of three certainties, taken one at a time. The occasion went first, dissolved into the feed. Then the group, which no longer has to gather in a room. Then the referent, the subject, the plain fact that something was once there in front of the lens. Bourdieu could take all three for granted in 1965, and all three were load bearing, because habitus, capital and field rested on them. But underneath the certainties lay two conditions he never had to name, because in his day they came free. The first was slowness: the habitus could pass for instinct only because it was laid down over a generation or a childhood, too gradually to be caught in the act; and that what a class had installed felt like who a person simply was. The second was a necessary blindness: prestige could work as prestige only as long as no one quite saw how arbitrary it was, and the field could feel like free creation only as long as the rules arranging it stayed out of sight.
What this essay has traced is not the death of the three ideas. It is what becomes of them once the slowness and the blindness are gone.
Take away slowness and the habitus does not die. It is industrialized and mass produced. A reflex that once needed a generation to settle is now pushed as a trend and updated in an afternoon, and because it is no longer tied to a class or the history of a body, it stops reproducing the old social order and starts reproducing the platform. The clearest sign is that the direction has reversed. In Bourdieu the group made the image, and the vector of light ran from the world to the photograph. Now it runs the other way. Instagram face produces the surgery, the generated look produces the taste, the invented influencer produces the desire it seems to answer. The thing photographed and the group, once the source of the picture, have become its products. The circle that once had to gather in a room is now an audience that need not gather at all. We are no longer the authors of our photographs. We are their raw material and their output, photographed into existence by a system that then folds us into itself.
The other two fail in the same motion. Capital, cut loose from scarcity, from the real social, and from rewarding the rare skill. It rewards whatever the system can read and amplify. Novelty still travels, but the machine captures it the moment it works, copies it into a filter or a preset, and hands it back as the next average. Bourdieu’s engine of distinction now runs through a machine that turns every distinction into a template. And what he called a Field barely survives when a single system makes the images, ranks them, sets the look and owns the arena. The competing does not stop; people fight harder than ever for reach. What stops is the field’s old independence and inherent value; the sense that its value is no longer negotiated in the social realm. The platform is now the real negotiator of value.
Which leaves the blindness. The neat ending would be that it has lifted, that we finally see the machinery. It has not. The evidence is already here. The patient who asks to be cut into the shape of a filter has not seen through anything; she is as deceived as any of Bourdieu’s villagers, and more thoroughly. But the friend beside her who knows the filter is false performs the same ritual regardless, posts the same face, chases the same count. That is the turn the new framework delivers when you push it this far. The system no longer needs us to be fooled, though it will take that too. It works on the deceived and the disabused alike, because belief was never the point, only participation. The ritual has mutated and outlived the belief that used to hold it up, which is colder than disenchantment, because disenchantment at least stops it.
This is where the loss stops being a matter of taste. For a century and a half, a photograph was the nearest thing we had to an objective shared floor under a disagreement, the image you could point to and say, this happened, whatever you make of it. That floor is being pulled up, not by forgery but by abundance, by a flood of pictures that carry the look of evidence and answer to nothing. Where the manufactured image is already a weapon, where histories are fought over frame by frame, a machine that produces flawless witnesses to events that never took place is not an aesthetic development. It is the quiet removal of one of the last instruments a society had for settling what is real. The referent was never only the photographer’s concern. It was everyone’s.
So, the question Kodak paid to have answered in 1965 finally has an answer, and it is not the open one. Photography still binds us together, exactly as Bourdieu said. It now binds us into the look and the economy of the system that writes our habitus, counts our capital and owns our field, and it does this without needing us to mistake any of it for freedom. None of this is undone by the witness in the pocket, the image that still, now and then, cuts against the people who own the ritual; that gain is real and it runs the other way, but it is a counter-current, an exception, not the direction of the river. We see the machinery plainly. We press the button anyway. Kodak’s first promise, in 1888, was that you press the button and it does the rest. Eastman Kodak filed for bankruptcy* in 2012 and all but disappeared in the process. The promise, however, has finally been fulfilled. It now does the rest, including the seeing.
V. The Light That Can Be Owned
Light has not disappeared; its source has moved. For a century and a half, the light came from the object, thrown off by a world that was there, and the photographer only chose what to keep of it. Now the light can come from the mind, from the prompt, from a person who originates the image rather than receiving it. And that is what settles the weight onto him. The habitus went to the platform, the capital to its currency, the field to the model, the referent to nothing, and now the seeing itself. Answerability cannot go with them. A photograph could always be traced to someone who released it and asked to stand behind it. The machine cannot be asked. It has no standing to be blamed or believed, and it can be held to nothing. So now responsibility cannot dissolve when the seeing is automated. It concentrates. When the light came from the world, you answered for what you kept. When it comes from your own mind, you answer for what you made. The more the apparatus does on its own, the more the one act left to the person, the decision to release the image, carries the whole of the weight. We have always said we shoot a photograph. The word was waiting for this. Firing a gun is the pure form of the principle: the mechanism does everything, and the one who pulls the trigger answers for all of it. The camera is becoming that, and the prompt already is. What stays in the hand is small, and it is everything, because it is the only part that can be owned.
The photographer’s question stays open. Whoever once stood behind the camera has to now decide how to carry that new responsibility, and there is no settled answer, only postures, each with its cost. One is the hacker, who stays inside the system and turns it against its owners, using the machine that makes the counterfeit to forge the counter-image and jam the feed. The system works on the disabused as well as the deceived, and it has always absorbed the people who fight it, so the hacker may be resistance or may be a reaction the machine has learned to reward. Another is the return, back to the film camera, the slow exposure, the trace, making the kind of picture the world still causes. That is not nostalgia if it is a stand on evidence and not a taste for grain, though it may guard a floor that no one else is standing on. Bourdieu held that ground before he theorised it. In Algeria, between 1958 and 1961, conscripted and then teaching at Alger in the middle of a colonial war, he carried a twin lens Zeiss Ikoflex specifically because it let him shoot from the chest rather than the eye, unseen, undramatic, a technical choice made for ethical reasons in a place where lifting a camera to the face could itself be an act of violence. He often asked and sent the prints back to the people in them. The man who found the family album unfree was, at the same time, standing somewhere unbearably real and answering for it.
The third is to embrace it, to take the referent as a loss already paid and work the new medium as what it is, a maker of simulographs, a director of models, a writer of prompts. That one at least does not pretend, and it hands over the single property that set a photograph apart from every other picture, then calls the surrender a medium. The hacker jams the feed. The returner guards the floor. The embracer names the loss.
None of the three is clean, and that is the position, not a failure to reach a better one. Those of us who still care about what we have until now called photography will have to choose which of them we can live inside.
I still have my childhood album. The colors have shifted further toward orange since I began writing this, and the faces have sunk a little deeper into the cotton paper. Someone chose each image in it slowly, judged it worth the wait and the cost, and handed it down. I did not make most of those pictures. I only inherited the choosing.
What came after is mine, shaped by a habitus fifty years in the making, laid down across every register the medium has moved through. Film in Beirut and Damascus, walls and faces and light that was there because the world was there. Hundreds of rolls. Thousands of frames on phones and memory cards, made in a dozen countries, at construction sites and in ruins and on ordinary streets where something was happening that I decided to keep. And now prompts, images originated in my mind, with no real referent behind them, no less real as work and no less mine as decisions. I do not rank them. I will not disown any of them.
But I know what each of them can answer for.
That is the only distinction that matters now. Not the medium, not the old against the new, not the craft against the machine. The question is simpler and harder: was the light real, or did I make it? When the light came from the world I answered for what I kept. When it comes from my own mind I answer for what I caused. The machine answers for nothing, because it can be held to nothing, and that gap is where the whole weight of the photographic practice now falls. The more it does on its own, the more the decision to release the image carries. A body of work is not a catalogue. It is a record of what you were willing to stand behind.
photographic work: richardsaad.com
* Note: Eastman Kodak Company. Corporate history, including the 2012 bankruptcy filing.
Bibliography
Bourdieu, Pierre, with Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, and Jean-Claude Chamboredon. Un art moyen. Essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie. Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1965.
Schultheis, Franz, and Christine Frisinghelli, eds. Pierre Bourdieu. Images d’Algérie, une affinité élective. Arles, Actes Sud / Graz, Camera Austria / Paris, Fondation Liber, 2003.
Jeu de Paume and Ville de Tours. Pierre Bourdieu, Images d’Algérie, une affinité élective. Dossier enseignants. Château de Tours, 16 June to 4 November 2012.
Tolentino, Jia. “The Age of Instagram Face.” The New Yorker, December 2019.
Time. “The 25 Most Influential People on the Internet.” 2018 (Lil Miquela entry).