Media infrastructures and the contemporary image cultures in which we operate in both our daily lives and educational and research contexts are currently characterized by high density, media heterogeneity, and automization. This produces a lack of oversight and understanding that awakens a desire for strong visual competence and sovereign powers of judgment. This article attempts to formulate an objection to this from a phenomenological and media-theoretical perspective, suggesting that the passive elements of aesthetic judgments should player a greater role in how we think about them. Judgments are not reduced to a result or conviction, but instead appear in their complex, fragile, and dividual process logic. The idea that judgments are not always controlled but can also be affected by the unintentional is discussed using the concept of judgement (re-)formation. This contains a political dimension, since a responsive understanding of judgment opens up spaces for interrogating complexities, and for affective processes and their negotiation.