how to sell the mundane

With the unstoppable emergence of various more or less ephemeral trends on the market, the not-so-discreet pursuit of quiet luxury, the glittery nostalgia of 2000s trashiness, or most recently the sleek and rigid bureaucratic office core, one’s mind oftentimes wanders to the omnipresence of all that is mundane and the intoxicating chic of its underlying troubledness. 

It seems almost impossible and futile to attempt to capture this particular essence of what one calls mundane and cage it within the definite frame of a singular definition. Frankly, one cannot explain the truth behind their circumstantial living conditions. 

Intimate shots by Davide Sorrenti and Corrine Day, old day Margiela shows, Harmony’s Korrine Gummo, in a culturally acclaimed way captured the beautiful in mundane, praised realness, to the core. An incongruous mixture, from which emerges an uncannily familiar portrait of troubled but somehow tranquil and enclosed within itself, an unrefined and unconditioned image of existence. Coated in dark, subdued hues of blues and grays, brownish and yellow subtones. Accompanied by the spots of crimson red. One misses it, and one unconsciously seeks to replicate it, yet it seems as it is not there anymore. What truly strikes me is this strong tendency or even a profound desire to extract a naturalistic dimension of beauty from the most painful triviality of living, carving out a lustful and sellable image out of existential tragedy or boredom.

Yet not every reality seems to protrude from its ephemeral state of oblivion into the pop cultural phenomenon. Subculture, the most favorite kind of reality that is adaptable to the market, creates itself naturally, out of the rights its people were left with, out of the circumstances they were born into. It is present in our social consciousness, but unless we partake in its cultivation, it will remain purely as a distant part within the blurry familiarity of our cultural landscape. Nevertheless, the reasoning behind, why is it so desirable to domesticate it, call our own, is conversely the fact that we have never experienced it directly. One desires exclusively the romanticized and selective extractions of the life that is in fact someone else’s daily nuisance. One searches for the curated meaning in the objects and situations that the other effectively experiences and innately perceives in a particular context. Without a doubt, it is one of the key aspects of the effective exploitation of consumeristic behaviors, profiting off a human desire to belong. Marketing an aspiration, putting up identities for sale, relentlessly results in enabling individuals to the destructive precedent of them, bending their spines for their new I. 

Contemporary fashion photography used to directly pursue to exemplify these naturalistic tendencies, this difficult, dirty authenticity. We are long past the desired, almost as strongly as it was later on publicly condemned, era of heroin chic. That deep raw intimacy, and sensitivity toward the people as individual beings, eternally marked by their life experiences and their sometimes dark backgrounds notably influenced the works of Davide Sorrenti and Corrine Day, with Nan Goldin on the forefront. They portrayed a new sense of truth derived from people, their hidden fascinations, and escapes, rejecting the idealistic and unattainable curation of aspirational visuals in glossy magazines. There was no overexposure of dark themes as it was oftentimes questioned. It was simply an act of excavating beauty out of individual human experience, openly, and unapologetically. 

Presently that same temptation by the mundane could be found in the narratives behind Juergen Teller’s photographs, who in a somewhat more saturated manner captures the life and its subjects, in a composition that is both uncanny and raw. Not to forget, the younger generation’s imagery work such as PFW retrospective selfies documentation published in 2023 by Tess Petronio. The juxtaposition of high fashion pieces positioned in mundane, casual landmarks of Paris fascinates me. Of course, it is staged, yet the play with the meaning of authenticity persists, as well as the polemic on how to distinguish between low and high culture. Perhaps the secret lies in the casual low-resolution iPhone photo extravaganza.

The 2014 Tumblr mania and it is presently happening, niche and quiet comeback from obsolescence, oftentimes bases its cultural relevance on the haphazard selection of the mundane images posted there. App users pushed the boundaries of such expression further, seeking to exhibit new depths of its cultural and empirical meaning, presumably to fetishize the mundane objects by contextualizing their presence in the photos. Those stills no longer captured the simple triviality of living, they were now being reinterpreted, deriving its modern significance from the glamorization of dark themes in the components of the individual existence. Yet, those posts still achieved to preserve a much greater, truer sense of intimate belonging to one’s actual life experience, in comparison to the so-called ‘casual posting’ on Instagram, which blatantly exposes the amount of curation and thought put into it.

Most of the photos traversing the online sphere, referred to as a part of the mundane aesthetic, came from niche, yet culturally relevant and deeply impactful film productions. Both Uli Edel’s Kinder von Bahnhof Zoo or less known, yet equally dark Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya 4-ever, depict not only a heavy subject by nature but above all deliver a strong visual experience, balanced on the borders of alluring and odious. The captivating portrayal of young female bodies and fragile minds juxtaposed with the dull and depressive landscapes of respectively West Berlin and the former Soviet Union imposes a strange feeling of constant malaise and languor. The tragic impossibility of escaping the inevitable. Both lead adolescent characters are subjected to unwarranted life circumstances, both for evermore bruised by the conditions they did not choose for themselves. It creates a raw portrayal of human tragedy that is simultaneously terrifying and enticing for the viewer. The fascinating, terrible pursuit of an escape out of the given reality. Through naivety, desperation, loneliness, into the world of temporary pleasures, first loves, that eventually take away the one thing one tirelessly grasped and searched for – freedom. Both Kinder von Bahnhof Zoo and Lilya 4-ever despite being deeply disturbing, somehow are still able to capture a terribly beautiful human ability to carve out solace and moments of short-lived yet sincere happiness out of the most gruesome lifelong predicament.

On the other side of the spectrum, Harmony Korine’s uncanny vision of the mundane – Gummo,  plays with the idea of familiarity found in unlived experiences and the terrifying immobilization by existential boredom. In a loosely narrated manner, this 1997 experimental movie follows the lonely lives of numerous characters ( among which, the most phenomenal Chloë Sevigny!), spent on trivial attempts to fill the empty hours of daylight by killing stray cats and selling the corpses to the owner of the local restaurant, to name one of them. As repulsive and disturbing as the film is, more importantly, it is a dirty, unethical yet deeply meaningful apotheosis of the mundane, an image of life that is conserved in a perpetual and unnoticed numbness.

It has always fascinated me deeply, how one is capable and not afraid of capturing the ugly, sometimes hidden truth of life.  Portraying it concurrently, as the most painstakingly beautiful, aspirational paradigm of human resilience in the search for beauty in the mundane. Against all odds. Why the external spectator is so desperately drawn to these mysterious yet somehow strangely familiar images? Why does one aspire so deeply to reach that low, whats is so disturbingly enticing in what the other tries to escape so badly? Can or should we sell these painfully trivial parts of human existence as an aspirational vision for commercial riches?