Imperfection and the Eye of the Artist

I have always been drawn to texture and grit in an image - whether that is a painting or a photograph. Years ago, way back in the days when the iPhone 3G was the top-of-the-line smartphone, I became intrigued with the amount of experimentation that could be done on this “studio in a pocket.” There was a vast difference in image quality between my DSLR (a Canon 5D Mark II) and the phone in my pocket. With the Canon DSLR, the image was tack sharp and razor focused. With the DSLR it is so easy to get a near perfect exposure that obliterates every single pixel of noise. With built-in rule-of-third guides it is so easy to nail a decent composition without much thought.

In the near-perfection of the digital image capture, I felt there was something missing. In my analog days of film photography, the grain of the film, the occasional light leak, and the very surface of the paper gave a certain life to the image. I'm drawn to smearing and degrading an image until the noise is amplified, the focus is smeared, and the composition agitates.

Why do such images appeal to me?

Perhaps it is like an artist who paints with watercolor on cold-pressed cotton paper. The image is richly texture. The deckled edges of the paper provide a gloriously imperfect frame for the image. The artist does not try to achieve photorealism. Instead, the artist captures an impression, a sense of place, of time. An emotion. Or perhaps it is more like my memory - the details fade away until I'm left with the essence of not so much what I saw - but, rather, what I felt.

All images taken with an iPhone 3G (much to the chagrin of my mega-pixel-puffed Canon 5D Mark II) and processed with much wild abandon and way too much fun using Stu Maschwitz's amazing (but sadly defunct) Plastic Bullet iPhone app.