Mistakes — mistakes are my favorite. Fingers in the frame, the photographer’s shadow blotting out the subject, the subject’s head cut off … This one gallops right past incompetent and back around toward sort of weirdly artistic, or at least intentional. Funny, even sweet, because someone kept it anyway.
How do you make a charming photo of a sweet little boy and his dog creepy and unnerving? Insert a random image of a stern old man in black. Insert it upside-down.
Was this meant to be cut apart? To be mailed as-is to some unsuspecting relative? (It is printed on the front of a postcard …) Or was it, like the photos taken with toy Holga cameras, some kind of artistic accident? At least it was a happy accident, to my eyes — but then I frequently like things for the wrong reasons, as this blog is no doubt ample evidence.
I love the photos that should have been thrown away. We don’t really have those anymore, not with a little viewing window and delete button on every camera. And yet see how much more personal they can seem? This old find bears the hand of the maker quite literally — in the shadow of a finger that drifted into the frame. And the tilting horizon line, the pen that ran out and had to be gone over in a different color, the corner that was bent and then smoothed — they’re as interesting to me as the hardscrabble landscape and the old truck in the background and Ray, who loved his dogs. Because someone obviously loved Ray.
