Our grandparents (bless their cotton socks) would admire photographs of family, friends, faraway places and beautiful landscape. The kids of today are sharing images of toilets, upside-down rats and spaghetti in coffee. The more a photo makes you want to look away, the more appealing it seems to be in this day and age.
According to the Norton Museum of Art's experts, the term “cursed image” emerged in online forums around 2015. Typically, cursed pics are those that evoke a subtle, inexplicable unease. As WIRED puts it, "Once your eyes land on a cursed image, it’s difficult to look away. And when you do, it’s hard not to scroll on for more."
Haley Nahman, a writer and the founder of Maybe Baby blog, says that cursed images are a lot like jokes. You either immediately get it (or understand why an image is cursed). And, if you don't, then, it's probably better left unexplained.
Nahman believes that most cursed images contain at least one of five features. “Something where it doesn’t belong” is the first, and what the writer describes as a "preeminent" quality of a cursed image.
"Unless there are real consequences, it is funny to have your expectations violated," they write. "Food is particularly potent in this category as we typically go to great lengths to protect it and keep it clean. There is simply not a single scenario in which an egg should be near a sewing machine. Not one!"
Another common feature of cursed images, says Nahman, is tonal incongruity between the subject(s) and impact of the image. For example, a clown smiling with a crying child, a panoramic-photo-gone-wrong of an infant crawling, or a nun smiling excitedly into the camera, eyes lit up like Satan.
"Perhaps in these cursed images we see our own failed attempts to deliver on our ideas, and laugh in recognition," Nahman muses.
"We are drawn to 'cursed images' because they somehow present us with a nagging ambiguity," says Francis McAndrew, a professor of psychology at Knox College. "Things that we cannot quickly make sense of trouble us and hold our attention, and we feel compelled to analyze them until we feel as if we understand them."
We keep on looking even when we want to look away...
So when and why did this obsession with cursed images begin? Apparently, the concept originated from a Tumblr blog in 2015. The owner of cursedimages.tumblr.com spoke to Papermag.com anonymously a few years ago.
"At the time, I had a voyeuristic hobby of searching the archives of Flickr to look at forgotten flash photography from years in the past," she said. "Some of these forgotten photographs just had an eerie mood about them, like someone had captured a moment from a dream or another life. I was particularly interested in finding photos of dark and empty rooms, mannequins and costumes, all of which became common themes among cursed images."
According to Papermag.com, the first-ever image posted to cursedimages.tumblr.com was of an old farmer surrounded by crates of red tomatoes in a wood-paneled basement, expressionlessly staring at the camera.
"It's the perfect cursed image to me because there's nothing inherently unsettling about any part of it. It's a totally mundane moment transformed into something else by the camera and the new context I've given it," reveals the site's owner, who is a former photography and film student.
