Casually Analyzing and Critiquing Max Caulfield’s Photography

Max Caulfield is a fictional 18-year-old art student and protagonist of the 2015 video game Life is Strange. I am a 23-year-old real world idiot with a BFA in interdisciplinary fine arts with a concentration in sculpture. And today seems like a nice day to critique Max’s work. Specifically, her “Everyday Heroes Contest” entry.

There has been a lot of disagreement on whether or not Max has talent, both in game by other characters and in our world by players. Her most noted body of work are her “selfies” and that there is the point of contention. Are “selfies” art? Does it take any artistic talent at all to take a photo of yourself? Why is Max being praised for what seems so simple and why is she allowed to call it art?

If you’ve played the first five minutes of Life is Strange, you probably already know the whole spiel. Self portraiture is a photographic touchstone, daguerreotypes so on and so forth. as well as being a long standing painting tradition (sculptors do busts of themselves sometimes, but sculpture is more about “object” than “image”). For example, Frida Kahlo’s self portraits are her most well known works. Rembrandt, Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, anyone’s name you’ve caught in an art history class has probably done a self portrait. So, historically™, it’s art (the debate of what is art and what isn’t is a headache, subjective, and ultimately meaningless. Really not worth getting into). Selfies are just a modern, accessible, wide spread form of self portraiture. You don’t need years of training and mastery of the human image or advanced technological knowledge and cumbersome equipment to capture an image of yourself anymore. All you need is a handy dandy phone, or in Max’s case an instant camera.

Now there’s the whole wide history of instant photography, but we can just keep to the basic beginning. Edwin Land, a scientist, was vacationing and took a photo of his daughter, his daughter asked why she couldn’t see the picture yet, bing bang boom he invents instant film and creates the company Polaroid because of this. Human impatience creates a new medium, as it does.

Max’s relation to instant photography is seemingly arbitrary. She’s a proclaimed hipster, into the retro and indie side of things, so it would make sense that she’s into the whole instant film thing that engulf “hip” stores like Urban Outfitters. Her best friend’s father had an instant camera that she grew up around, so perhaps it’s nostalgia. Who knows. She just likes it and it’s convenient to a time travel narrative to have physical images (kind of like the movie Memento in a way). There is a romance to physically holding a scene you just captured in your hand moments after the fact after all. Max is a sentimental person who’d appreciate that.

What I find to be the most compelling part of Max’s work is the juxtaposition of modern “selfie” culture with instant film. Anyone who has taken a selfie knows the process; you take 10, 30, 50 selfies in a row and pick out what you consider to be the best one to show off. SD cards can hold thousands, even millions of images and makes the amount of photos you can take of yourself nearly infinite as you capture and delete. Instant film on the other hand, is finite. And it’s expensive. Max uses a Polaroid 600 series camera and a Polaroid Spectra series camera in the game, and the film for either of those will run you about $20 for an eight sheet pack. So commenting on our self portraiture trends in that way, limiting yourself and capturing yourself as you are without the backup we’ve become accustomed to, is something special. No primping, no capturing the “right” angle, no editing in order to hide your flaws. You come out as you are in the moment you press the shutter. It’s a really interesting view point on the nature of accessibility of images in the modern world, the culture’s obsession with the “perfect” or “defining” image of oneself, and it can even be a comment on the transition of technology during her lifespan. I think that is all the key to Max’s work. It kills me that they don’t talk about this in game, or whatever her possible reasoning is for the medium she’s working in and why she’s doing it, but no one wants to really be subjected to boring art analysis while playing a video game.

Now for the photo at hand (fun fact, cut dialogue tells us it’s titled “Windows”). The prompt of the contest is to “submit an image that best represents yourself or others in heroic action.” And uh, upon first look Max’s photo doesn’t really fit the bill. Her back facing the camera, out of focus, and the focus being on her “photo memorial wall” in her bedroom. However, this can be a subversion of the contest theme, putting the focus off the heroic actions of “yourself” and putting it on others in their everyday life. But…it falls flat. It’s rain puddle deep at best. Though, Max is 18 and just started art school, this sort of thing happens as you’re first going through the wringer. More often than not fine art photography isn’t as concept heavy as the rest of the fine arts anyway, so it isn’t the biggest deal in the world that there’s a shallow concept. While I like the soft colors that call to nostalgia/safety and the geometry of the subject photos, the composition of the photo is not great; the lantern string lights and the bed distracting and cluttering the frame and there isn’t a whole lot of contrast that makes your eye move around other than the still-soft colors of Max’s body. Those elements and Max just being in her street clothes can possibly give off the vibe “everyday,” but really it just says to me that she didn’t feel like moving her shit or didn’t think to. It’s kind of lazy…but the whole instant film mentality, capturing a moment as it is, is enticing. It’s an ever redeeming idea that can be used as justification for pretty much any imperfection. It isn’t the worst photo in the world and it definitely doesn’t denote lack of talent, just some lack of thought that I’m sure she’d work on if she were a real person.

In my opinion, despite everything I just said above, what makes art worthwhile is how much of an emotion it can invoke in you. Like all my artspeak nonsense, being involved in the art world, and having a degree doesn’t mean shit at the end of the day. If you walk into a museum, see some graffiti on the street, a sculpture in a park, and you feel the emotions pouring off something? That’s what’s good. Art is the study of what it’s like to be human and if you truly feel something speaks to your humanity, it’s good art. You can explain concepts all day, write manifestos, and have the most well thought out, planned images in the world. But if it’s boring, it’s boring. And that kind of shit is all the flies in the art world. You need to be borderline annoyingly confident in your work and have the elitist, pretentious words to back it up in order to be taken seriously, as well as have the charisma to schmooze with the galleries and patrons if you hope to find any success. And that has fuckall to do with artistic talent, skill, or craft, sadly. Life is Strange lacks explanation for most of its artwork until Episode Five, where the most seasoned artist in the game gives a whole artist’s statement about his work as a villain speech. That was definitely an interesting choice and could be a commentary on art world bullshit, among themes that appear in this point in the game, but that’s better left explored another time.

Max is growing. She does have talent and a clear interest in her work, but she needs to refine it and, I think, actually feel what she’s doing. The majority of her work we see are the optional photos you can take throughout the course of the game, which are random snap shots, again in line with the instant film mentality of capturing a moment as it is. There’s something to be said about the fleeting feeling of beauty in a moment and trying to put it on paper, but what it often amounts to is what we find on most instagram accounts today; funny, weird, interesting moments that don’t have a lot to them. The photos she takes that I get the most out of are the ones she takes of Chloe. Even removing the in game context of those photos and their history together, you can tell how much rebellion/sadness/love is happening in that moment just by looking. There is a vision, a voice, a story to delve deeper into in those photos. Whether or not she finds any financial success or critical praise, she has the potential to craft meaningful, moving work even if it’s just for herself. And that’s what matters and what makes her a good artist. But she’s a fictional character and not real so that probably isn’t going to happen. Probably.