Formal accident: technical flaws

For as long as anyone has been taking pictures, some of them haven’t come out. Photographic flaws have to do with weak spots in current technology, which means they evolve along with photography itself. In the case of snapshots, the ever-changing segment of existing photographic technology incorporated by the cameras and processing is always the absolute bottom of the barrel, and the technical problems at every point are glaring—though they may not last long. To take a crude example, double exposures are gone forever, because they were a side effect of the mechanical advancement of film. Black-and-white Polaroids, the kind you pulled from the back of a camera, had characteristic blemishes. Film problems changed with the film; lens problems changed with the lenses. I don’t know just what was too much for the camera in this 1920s example apart from a bit of backlighting, but I can tell you I haven’t seen an effect like this one lately. At any given stage, the snapshooters overlooked photographic flaws to some extent, at least if they weren’t truly lethal to a photo. I’ve often seen severely flawed snapshots pasted without comment into photo albums: they still served their purpose, and that was the main thing. Actually, in many cases the flaws must have been difficult to perceive. The whiz-bang novelty of any technology tends to obscure its problems, so that they become evident only in hindsight—this is clear to us when we buy new electronic devices and wonder how we could have lived with our old ones. An immature color process was still commercial as long as it was new; in the same way, all the deficiencies of consumer photography must have been largely invisible until the next generation of cameras made them impossible to miss. When we look at any blatantly fortunate photographic accident, some sort of awe is part of our experience of it. A shot like this one was created and delivered to us by an absurdly improbable chain of events, and that is some of what our “wow” is about. The picture is a small miracle. But unlike accidents of subject selection, technical flaws don’t make us think about what was outside the frame or about the moment of framing. And unlike wear and damage, they don’t add a historical dimension to a photo considered as an object. They can contribute the atmosphere and texture that make a picture attractive, and in extreme cases (such as double exposures) they can create the entire point of interest. Nevertheless, technical flaws, like any kind of gross accident, will most likely be noxious to the overall image; normally we don’t want them any more than the snapshooters did (if they noticed them). Over- and underexposures are rarely beneficial, for example, and a double exposure is usually just a mess. A technical accident that is truly helpful is an accident of accident, like a blow to the head that changes your personality for the better. We are necessarily interested in freak occurrences of one kind or another, but these accidents of the “middle” era are in a sense freakier than accidents of composition or of history. Purely technical accidents, all about cameras and chemicals and nothing else, do not connect with the world of the snapshooters (as accidents of composition do) or with our world (as do accidents affecting, as objects, the objects that we see and handle), and they can seem merely tricksy—much like technical flash in music or movies or any other medium. For that reason I find them difficult to use. But I stress again that, in this intensely low-grade photographic environment, technical accident must most often be prophylactic, though invisible. If harmful flaws are constantly occurring in large numbers, we will often need another accident to save us from them.

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