We're drowning in detail and starving for meaning.
8K, 12K, RAW everything—like more pixels will redeem our lack of point of view. Resolution is not cinema. Resolution is not photography. Resolution is a microscope for your intention (or your absence of it). If your frame has nothing to say, it will now say nothing with immaculate clarity.
Film grain used to offer mercy. It softened vanity. It protected mystery. It made the image feel like memory rather than surveillance. Digital is a harsh spotlight. AI is makeup—sometimes tasteful, sometimes grotesque, always revealing what you're trying to hide.
Avedon didn't need pores to show you a person. He needed posture, gaze, and the psychological trap of a white background. He understood something modern creators forget: mystery is not a flaw. Mystery is an invitation. It gives the audience room to participate.
The obsession with resolution is often an obsession with control. If we can see everything, we can dominate everything. But art isn't domination. Art is selection. Art is exclusion. Art is choosing what not to show because what's not shown becomes the pressure that shapes what is.
Modern tools make it easy to overexplain. You can sharpen forever. You can clarify forever. You can "enhance" until the image stops feeling like a moment and starts feeling like a rendering. The audience will feel the difference. Again, they may not articulate it, but their nervous system will.
So by all means, capture high resolution if you need it for workflow, for cropping, for stabilization, for deliverables. But don't confuse capture with meaning. Meaning comes from restraint. From choices. From the courage to let certain things fall into shadow.