Picture this.

How does one view a photograph? What changes when it's an isolated image, devoid of any sort of contextual background information? Country of origin, year taken, found image or original, portrait, still-life, landscape, event. Heavily composed, phone camera capture, candid, arranged, staged. A scan of a negative, a scan of a print (done commercially [by professionals] or personally [ditto]), a jpeg captured at screen resolution. With flash or without.

We could go on.

None of this is particularly deep. My commentary. The work is from Tiny Vices. I think it's hands down some of the best work being done, currently, in the world right now. If I could point to one site that I would say presents a "school of photography" that I would consider myself a part of, Tiny Vices would be that site.

Tiny Vices is actually overflowing with work. The reason that these are single images bereft of grounding is that they receive so many contributions that many are filtered into numbered "various" galleries. These, taken from the most recent, are from a sequence of nearly 500 images, the only way to navigate through to click the small, unobtrusive advance button. More than one could comfortably view in a sitting. I believe in pacing. Quite firmly, in fact. So all I'm doing here is trying to highlight, honor, pay thanks to, and note that I would like to take pictures of this caliber before I die. (Sometimes I do.)

Things I find surprising about this set. One is the total absence of black and white work. To say nothing of Photoshop, mostly because I don't believe many of these utilize it heavily, if at all. I wonder if that will become a defining characteristic as time passes (assuming it isn't well established as a divide already). The separation between film and digital feels far, far less relevant to me. After all, whether these images were produced with chemistry or optical sensors, their path to our eyes here has been thoroughly digitized already. However, the question of the extent of their manipulation can't ever be completely unasked. Ultimately, though, work like this asks one to choose other questions first. I choose to believe that if these images are manipulated it is to no further extent than what can be achieved in basic printing techniques.

I once described an endless desert of internet culture. Navigating and exploring Tiny Vices... the sensation I get is more of navigating down long, winding paths in a dense forest.