If you learn enough, and buy the right equipment and software, you can get right up to the edge of what’s possible with available technology.  You can create images that are incredibly sharp with no perceptible noise/grain, construct expertly executed lighting scenarios, selectively edit for exposure, contrast, color and even style, and retouch your pictures to an unworldly perfection.  You can even pose your subjects in such a way as to have no perceptible soul.

I’ve done it, and you can, too.  You can make your editorial images look PERFECT.  Perfectly illustrative.  Perfectly unreal.

But, if that’s what you’re trying to do now, you better wake up.  That look is dead.

Oh, sure, there are hold-outs that think the mannequin look is still happening.  But, nope.  It’s been losing ground for awhile.  It’s empty, and people don’t want empty anymore.   It’s just boring, and says nothing.

So, where do you go from here?  Where did audiophiles go when they discovered that perfect sound wasn’t human enough?  They went back to loving vinyl.  The hiss and click and texture and imperfection WAS perfection.

We are now at a place where the look of film is popular again.  Ever shoot an editorial piece with a Holga, or something in the 35mm range?  Try it, you might like it.  Alternatively, people with digital cameras are trying to make their images look less sharp, more grainy, not so properly exposed.  Subjects are posed with real expressions on their faces.  Wind is blowing, skin is showing, colors are shifting, light is leaking.  We want it to be real again (or at least to look that way), so bad it hurts.

Image:  Jenny Lewis, ACL Festival, 2008.