seductive mistake-ography
1 07 2006
I’ve just uploaded some of the images from my very first rolls of medium format film, which I butchered in a Holga ‘toy’ camera and a Lubitel (a bit less of a toy, but still plastic). I shot off the first few rolls pretty much just as I wandered around the house. I love the sometimes beautiful mistakes (double exposures, lack of focus), the risk involved with choosing settings and then pressing the shutter when you don’t know an F stop from a bus stop, and the anxious wait to see what (if anything) the images look like when you get them back from the lab. There’s just something about all of it that I can’t help but be seduced by.
And, yes, to all those who have heard my several rants about how much I’m irritated by ‘the recuperation of the banality of everyday life as both extraordinary and resistant through knowing tactics of aestheticisation’ etcetera, I am definitely reviewing my former holier-than-thou attitude towards the practice, if not the institutionalised wankery, of ‘lomography’. After all, it’s just so fun and easy and, well, pretty.
Really love the image. I have not heard (or read) your rant on edl; could you say more? Of course, if others know it well — feel free to just say it to me (no hurry though).
plastic cameras……
seductive mistake-ography…
Hi Greg, in short the rant was to do with cultural studies tending to reify particular interpretations of the everyday; as opposed to observing the poetry in the everyday in its own terms. Something like that - I go through it using lomography as an example in my recent Continuum article. But like I say, I’m not sure I hold precisely this position anymore.