Photography
Uncough — The New Photography Site for Miserable People
Unsplash it isn’t!

Sometimes, I’m looking for a really miserable photo for a piece. A drab photo of a rusty nail or a dirty brick wall. A depressing and hard-hitting close-up of the world in action. A real-life mind bender to remind us everything is shit!
Instead, I get this:

This is what I got from a photo search on Unsplash entitled: ‘Suicide.’
Not quite what I had in mind. I’m not sure 10 inches above the ground is going to do the trick. Unless there’s a subliminal message there, like don’t try this at home. Or don’t go hot-air ballooning.
This was another one. ‘Fear of dying.’ And I got:

So OK, that’s closer to the subject. But I still can’t help laughing when I see it. I mean dead bodies don’t actually look like that. They look like this.

So you see, it’s hard to get really dark and disturbing images on sites like Unsplash. This is why I’m proposing a rival site called Uncough where us morbid folk can get our out-of-focus, poor-quality, miserable images from.
Just like they have on Wiki Commons.
Wiki Commons is great. It doesn’t pretend to be fancy because it isn’t. And it has some brilliantly bad photos.
Check this out:

This was for a piece of mine entitled: ‘Last Rites.’ Wiki Comms gave me a badly taken photo from the side of a piece of Roman pottery displayed in the Louvre. Magic!
For another article entitled, ‘Hell on Earth,’ it gave me this gem.

I love this one, as nothing is worse than a bus station at night to conjure up visions of hell. I remember once being stuck in Derby bus station in the UK all night and I still have nightmares.
One of my favourites though is the image I chose for my nihilist piece called ‘The END.’

If you’re thinking that it looks a bit colourful, it’s because it was a mistake. I was actually looking to rent a boat for a week during the summer, but added the word ‘Lute’ into the search by accident.
It works well, though. I like the way her foot is ready to spring forward into the abyss. And how she’s firmly focusing on her spot in the ocean so as not to get caught on the rocks on her way down.
Plus, the thickness of her robe and the addition of the lute point to the fact that she believes survival is unlikely.
This is what Uncough can offer. If Unsplash’s slogan is: Beautiful Free Images. Uncough is: Unsparing!
It’ll be like a one-stop shop for all those tormented souls out there looking for an image to accompany their tortured piece.
There’s nothing worse than pouring your heart out, finishing a piece, only to be faced with the tedious task of trawling through 1000 images of dogs and cats. Or men with pink balloons.
Uncough leads straight into the heart of darkness, through the hoop of despair, and back up for another round of hopelessness.
Uncough: Coming Soon.
Thanks to Smillew Rahcuef.