Why are so many people moved by this wedding photograph?

 
It is natural to expect that with technological advances we will also become more civilised, culturally sophisticated and capable of intelligence in understanding art. But the rise of digital photography proves this to be untrue.
Superb widely available cameras, often on our phones, have turned us all into “artists”. But the art we make, coo over and share on Instagram is often unbelievably corny, sentimental, vacuous nonsense. The more easily created and universally visible photography becomes, it seems the more flesh-crawlingly stupid its aesthetic values. We are turning into a world of bad artists, cosily congratulating one another on every new slice of sheer kitsch.
The latest chapter in this decline of pictorial civilisation is the ludicrous fuss made over an apocalyptic wedding photograph that went viral this week. Photographer Sam Yeldam was taking pictures of a sinister sky over Sydney harbour when he spotted a pair of newlyweds having their photo taken on a jetty. He snapped them too, and his distant view of the couple framed against the fiery, cloud-swagged sky and glowing water quickly became an internet sensation.
Why were so many people moved by this picture? Why was it reported as world news when Yeldam’s search for the couple resulted in their getting in touch? And why do headlines about this kind of story always use such insanely strident language? “The amazing story of how a photographer found the mystery wedding couple he captured in a beautiful photograph.” “Photographer finds the mystery couple from dazzling wedding photo.”
The fascinating and absurd thing about these sorts of headlines – typical not just of this story but of online “criticism” of photography in general – is the way they remorselessly prejudge the viewer’s response. The photograph is “beautiful”, it is “dazzling”. The Sydney Morning Herald chips in that it is “spectacular”, and so on. How we respond to the picture is decided in advance by these headlines, which are themselves, of course, inanely going along with likes and shares among the online community that has universally agreed to be moved by this picture and its story.

I can see the future of art and it is a viral photograph stamping on human sensibilities. When the machines take over, this is how they will control us. We will wake up in the morning, pick up our device and immediately see (along with the latest sexist/racist/homophobic remark made by a hapless celebrity to get angry about and the latest TV baker to idolise) today’s Beautiful! Dazzling! Spectacular! photograph to coo over.
This photograph is silly, not beautiful. The framing of the newlyweds against a brooding thundery seascape is absurdly trite. It has the fake feeling and gooey pathos of a really awful 1970s poster or Jack Vettriano’s The Singing Butler. There is no humour in this conjunction of love and nature, no humanising irony. Instead we are supposed to be genuinely moved by the “amazing” sight of that tiny couple under a Viking sky. It is positively Wagnerian in all its stormy soullessness.
So to the question, why are so many people moved by this picture? The answer cannot be pretty, let alone beautiful. Because only a deepening ignorance of true art and real beauty can explain why such hackneyed ephemera might move multitudes.
Serious artists of course no longer bother with beauty. And so, abandoned by the art world, beauty has been left to hack photographers. A generation that has absolutely no aesthetic ballast, no time to give the kind of true beauty you might find in a painting by Howard Hodgkin, reacts, as if jerked by an emotional cattle prod, to a cheap bit of pimped-up nature as if it were real art.
The easiness and redundancy of what we call “beauty” in modern photography is jading our souls and wrapping our hearts in honey. Not even real honey: we are drowning in honey substitute. All the glory of the world is being reduced, second by second, snap by snap, to instant, mechanical tropes of the picturesque. Amazing. Spectacular. Dazzling. Dead.