With an aim to reject a rational and literal portrayal of life, the artists focus on dreamlike worlds full of magic, distortion, horror, and the unconventional. Surrealist artists can be considered some of the first artists to expressly explore the concept of the uncanny in their work. Whilst this kind of imagery may be a relatively new online phenomenon, drip fed into our lives through the omnipotence of the internet and the joined-at-the-hip reliance we all have on connected devices, the kind of disquiet propagated by cursed images has long been a source of fascination for artists. Their sources and participants are unknown and unknowable-circulated oddments of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another-car crash viewing with the visceral cocktail of unease, horror, repulsion and bewilderment. They lurk in every dark recess of the online world, passed around in group chats, social media and amidst the digital margins. Somehow things are not how our brains believe they are supposed to be, and this prevailing sense is our predominant source of unease or disquiet. The image often has an improvised or amateurish feel, containing odd effects of light, often from a flash, random and puzzling items placed in incongruous places or in unusual ways. The five Ws are most commonly derived from a found analogue (non-photoshopped) image that has been taken with an old flash camera or phone. “It’s the perfect cursed image to me because there’s nothing inherently unsettling about any part of it,” said the blogger “It’s a totally mundane moment transformed into something else by the camera and the new context I’ve given it.” The first image ever posted to the blog depicted a man surrounded by crates of red tomatoes in a wood-effect melamine panelled basement, the kind of banal everyday Americana interior afficionados of William Eggleston and Stephen Shore are familiar with. I was particularly interested in finding photos of dark and empty rooms, mannequins and costumes, all of which became common themes among cursed images.” When interviewed by Paper Magazine on the condition of anonymity the 19-year-old female photography and film student from the American Northwest explained “some of these forgotten photographs just had an eerie mood about them, like someone had captured a moment from a dream or another life. “At the time, I had a voyeuristic hobby of searching the archives of Flickr to look at forgotten flash photography from years in the past,” explained the owner of. The cursed image as a concept originated from a Tumblr blog in 2015. Video explaining cursed Images: A Short History of The Uncanny Tumblr & the Online Origin of Cursed Images We take a look at the history of these images, from the early day of surrealism to the present day. When the clarity of information like these key details are lacking from an image, it is inevitable, there are more questions than answers. What are Cursed Images and How Does One Find Them?Ĭonsensus has come to define a cursed image as any image that can incite the five Ws in a viewer’s curiosity: who, what, when, where and why.
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