Seeking imperfections
Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, 2005
“I do not portray being. I portray the passing. Not the passing from one age to another, or, as the people say, from seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute.” (Montaigne)
20 years ago, I had a cheap Minox film camera that was unpredictable. Most pictures taken with it were flawed, yet in a surprisingly nice way. I was living in Japan and spontaneously took photos on the streets or at my apartment, never quite sure of the results until the films were processed. Later on, I had an iPhone with a scratched less that somehow created rather similar atmospheric sceneries, grainy, and out of focus.
These days, following an unfortunate thermos flask incident, I find myself with a half-broken digital camera with a viewfinder but without a functioning screen, and which is oversensitive to light. Recalling the days of the Minox, I thought that I could maybe make something out of this situation instead of buying a new camera.
I relied on the RX100 for about 2 years as a high precision compact device, and sometimes found the images to be too perfect. Our digital devices and media culture are focused on smoothing appearances: filter, color-enhance, HDR-capture, crop and reframe to “perfection”. Now, this half-broken camera tells me that there once was a world where accidental images happened often and where life in general was much less formatted and predictable. And the lack of control brought a sense of life, of feeling alive… It may be time to revive that sense back into our lives, and in various ways, however that may be.
