What is a bad picture? Is it exposure, grain, geometry, content… Aesthetics is a strange philosophic endeavour. It was once a large focus of philosophical systems… but has waned, particularly after the “rational” revolution of the englightenment and industrialization of humanity. What makes something beautiful, and can that thing be universal? Or is it always a personal question?

For me I have an intuition about beauty. And it evolves. I look at images I captured 5 years ago and sometimes I feel pride. Sometimes I’m shocked about what didn’t make the cut. I can be reflective of the different approaches I might take now. I can also get caught up in the thought that I had better work then, when I was less encumbered by “knowledge”.

In the end, I suppose it doesn’t matter. What matters more is that I continue to find opportunities to take pictures. Bad pictures. A lot of them. The aim of ultimately efficiency and perfection is a pursuit towards madness. I cannot fathom the pursuit of holding a camera and only actuating a shutter when I am utterly convinced that I have captured THE moment.

Particularly with candid, documentary, street, and other impulsive works… this is simply not possible. Human beings are too random. Even moments in architectural and natural photography are dependent on so many different fluctuations and probabilities. Quality of light, weather, dust, animals, reflections, noise… I don’t know. How does one aim to control nature itself?

Studio and commercial photography do their best to create man made and man controlled environments… and even then, how often are professional photographers taking one frame per client.

So my recent aim, pre-COVID, was to take at least 24 bad frames a day. Or at least per trip. It’s a weird thing to do. I do not want the aim to lean too far into my EXPECTATIONS of what make a photograph bad. Instead, I wanted to work to rid myself of the impulse of self doubt and over analysis. To get back to taking pictures intuively, especially since I work in the digital format and frames are (essentially) free!

I’d be a terrible film photographer. HAHAHA

So. Here’s some bad pictures.