Fakultät Kunst und Gestaltung

In an age where likability has become the dominant currency of visibility, images are no longer seen. They are evaluated, ranked, and fed back into the loop of self-perception. Social media cultivates a relentless regime of aesthetic affirmation: to be seen is to be liked, and to be liked is to be validated. But what if photography resists this logic?

Studio-based image practices offer a sanctuary. A space of refusal, where the compulsion toward the beautiful, the perfect, the pleasing can be held at bay. As Susan Sontag observed, "No one ever discovered ugliness through photography. But many have discovered beauty." The act of photographing, historically and habitually, has been tethered to the desire to frame the world in aesthetic terms: to make it palatable, desirable, kalos.

Yet what happens when the camera turns toward the uncomfortable, the unflattering, the ambiguous? Not to beautify it, not to aestheticise ugliness into a form of alternative beauty, but to sit with its friction, to resist the soothing smoothness of the scroll.

Rosalind Gill reminds us that the visual culture of social media is full of contradictions. It is a space where young women are simultaneously empowered and surveilled, expressive and anxious, curated and authentic. Within this paradox, the image becomes a site of both self-making and self-erasure. Striving to be perfect, yet authentic; visible, yet safe from critique.

In her book Hässlichkeit, artist and theorist Moshtari Hilal deepens this critique by tracing how cultural, colonial, and gendered norms have shaped our ideas of beauty and, crucially, our fear of the ugly. From body hair to brown teeth, from Darwin to Kim Kardashian, she examines how bodies are coded, corrected, and policed. Hilal's reflections move between personal memory, political analysis, and speculative imagination, challenging us to reframe what we see when we look and why we look away.

"Pictures made to dislike" are not failures of the visual; they are acts of philosophical dissent. They question the premise that images must soothe, seduce, or sell. In disrupting the mainstream, they gesture toward another way of seeing. One that does not seek to resolve, but to reveal. Not ugly, not beautiful, but necessary.