misrepresentation, imperfection, and distortion

I’m posting this a bit late in the game (I was out of reach of a good internet connection most of this week), so I’m going to bypass some of the more obvious discussion of aesthetic techniques and composition to focus on the role of misrepresentation, imperfection, and distortion in photography. 

If photography is a fundamentally representational technology (a tool for capturing reality), what makes one photograph more pleasing or interesting than another must be either in how that reality is chosen, framed, arranged, etc (i.e. composition) or how that reality is distorted or changed in its capture. These distortions can be byproducts of the photographic process (e.g. the extremely shallow depth of field in macro photography), characteristics of specific photographic tools (e.g. the special feel of old Polaroids) or effects added in the developing/processing process. 

This photograph from my marcos assignment is a good example of how the photographic process can distort reality (and hopefully do so in an aesthetically pleasing way).

The misrepresentative aspects of photography are especially interesting to me. The use of photography not to simply record images but also to abstract and recontextualize reality seem like an important part of photography as art and not just snapshots/documentation.

In doing some research for this post, I happened across a fascinating blog post from German cultural theorist Bernd Stiegler on the role of imperfection in modern photography. Stiegler notes the prevelance of conscious imperfection in current photography, from deliberate technical errors to use of outdated and imperfect outdated cameras (e.g. the Lomography craze). He argues that “photography has become enamored of and committed to inaccuracy, because it enables a form of representation that aims to conceptualize reality in a unique aesthetic manner.”

I’m sure that this trend is in large part a reaction to the precision and relative simplicity of digital photography. When it becomes easy to produce “perfect” images, then next step is to explore the “imperfect” ones. What is interesting to me within the realm of digital photography, however is how the “perfect” and the “imperfect” can be brought together – how we can use both representation and misrepresentation as tools in our art.