There are good reasons to be suspicious of this flood of images. What is the fate of art in the age of metastasized mechanical reproduction? These are cheap images; they are in fact less than cheap, for each image costs almost nothing. Postprocessing is easy and rampant: beautiful light is added after the fact, depth of field is manipulated, nostalgia is drizzled on in unctuous tints of orange and green. The result is briefly beguiling to the senses but ultimately annoying to the soul, like fake breasts or MSG-rich food. Matt Pearce, in his thoughtful polemic on this subject in the New Inquiry, wrote: “Never before have we so rampantly exercised the ability to capture the way the world really looks and then so gorgeously disfigured it.”

— Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things, Faber & Faber, Ch. Gueorgui Pinkhassov, 2016