What We’ve Found: Mass Production

Image: Anthony Lepore

It’s 2020; it’s also been 2020, but I still scrawled 2019 down on the sheet of paper that I was drafting this on. Depending on who you are and what you do, you may or may not possess intimate knowledge of the date and time when you get quizzed on it. As a freelancer with two (three?) part-time jobs, I can rarely tell someone the day of the week. You tend to remember Mondays and Fridays when you’re working nine to fives. This is also somewhat silly though, because does it really matter so much? Pretty sure it was Buck Mulligan, in Joyce’s Ulysses, who famously said “a day is a day is a day” in response to Stephen Dedalus waking up unsure if it was a Wednesday or a Thursday. Quite positive that that’s what went down.

This month, Aint-Bad wants to know what you’ve found in the vein of mass production. Try to survey your surroundings and think of everything you see that gets produced en masse in a factory or sweatshop somewhere. If you’re one of our lucky readers stranded on a remote island and receiving this written text via hand-made 14th-century glass bottle, then you have my heartiest congratulations. Throughout the first world, mass-produced goods, commodities, and structures are present in almost every facet of day-to-day life. To some rich bastard lying stark naked on an original Picasso in a room where every surface is, in fact, also an original Picasso: perhaps you are a unique exception; also, fuck you. It’s not for me to tell y’all whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing or a just-so thing, but it’s undeniably real and certainly a thing that happens.

Better yet, though, we’re inviting our amazing readers (as well as any interested party!) to show us, through dank photographic art, how you’ve visually understood mass-production! We invite you to interpret the theme of mass production closely or loosely, but we ask that you follow our file submission guidelines to be considered for the final cut.

We are looking for just one to three solid images from each artist so let us see your best work! Be sure to dig through your archives and your hard drives. Submit no later than March 27th in order to be considered for this month’s What We’ve Found! The results will be posted around the end of the month.

Submit Today!