This Is an Image

2025
Video installation

The work originates from Clemens Poole’s collaboration with a friend who worked as a fixer for various foreign media outlets during the first year of the full-scale invasion. As they sifted through hours of recorded footage, their conversations revolved around the act of selection itself: Why are certain frames chosen for broadcast or social media? What makes one image seem more ‘accurate’ or ‘truthful’ than another?

From these reflections emerged a video that examines the elusive and problematic notion of the ‘ideal image’ — a concept shaped by the relentless production of wartime visuals and the global circulation of mediated empathy. The film explores how we evaluate images, either actively or passively, and how those evaluations are informed by what the artist calls a latent ideal.

This ‘perfect image’ is always undefined, yet somehow certain: if only the view, crop, angle, direction, or light were better, we might better perceive what is accurate or truthful — an image that could more fully communicate our reality, our intention, or both. During wartime, when image-making plays a crucial role in the urgency and effectiveness of military, civilian, and political information, understanding — and potentially producing — this perfect image becomes a matter of life or death, even as it remains out of reach.

The work asserts that this latent ideal — the unseen ‘perfect’ we instinctively strive toward — shapes how we make, read, and circulate images. It suggests that we operate as both agents and consumers of images because of this ideal, or at least under its quiet, guiding influence.