A Flawed Kind of Beauty
Finding beauty in spaces outside the lines
You never know that you’re a perfectionist until someone looks you dead in the eye and calls you out for it.
During my final year of classes, we had a semi-artistic assignment that forced us to explore an analog form of media to give us an appreciation for “slow” media.
As a photographer, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to experiment with taking Instax photos (even though everyone calls them Polaroids, which is the brand, not the object).
I became consumed with figuring out how to take the perfect photo on my analog little device.
I watched multiple YouTube videos, and tried applying what I understood from my DSLR to the sensor on my Instax camera.
Unfortunately, this didn’t work out so well.
While I managed to capture some gorgeous photos of the fall leaves and the fresh snow on the steps of my college, there were major flops .
In thinking that I knew the camera, I underexposed some of the photos taken at night. All I got were blurry little lights peeking back at me from 90 cent film.
At other point, I overexposed some of the photos taken in direct sunlight, causing the light to swallow up the details of my photo, leaving me with images emitting a halo-like glow.
Dismayed, I met up with my professor a few weeks into the project, and asked him what I should do about these images. Should I keep them in a separate album? Throw them away? (I wasn’t too serious about that- I was at least $100 worth on film deep into this project now).
He smiled, and shook is head at me as we walked down the corridor.
“Why are you obsessed with making it perfect?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders. “Why are you judging the project before it’s even finished?”
I wasn’t sure how to respond. I wasn’t sure whether I felt offended, or called out, or a combination of both.
I explained that when shooting events, I was constantly checking my settings on my Canon to make sure that everything was captured just so.
“There’s a beauty to the imperfection. Stop worrying about it so much,” he reassured me. “Mistakes can be beautiful.”
When I was putting my album together for the project, I kept thinking back to his words, especially when looking at the darker or overexposed photos.
They were all precious moments in time that I wrapped up in a pleather-bound three-ring photo album.
Whether or not the photo turned out wasn’t as important to me as I flipped through the pages and relived what ended up being my final full semester at school.
Sure, I was still annoyed when the photographs weren’t perfect, but I tried to savour the moment I took the photo instead of obsessing about every last framing detail being perfect.
And perhaps there’s something beautiful in that.
