The space of a lapse: Photographic errors and epiphanies of language

You can’t begin a poem without a bit of error about yourself and the world, without a straw of innocence at the first words.

[René Char, La bibliothèque est en feu]

 

The invention of photography has been accompanied, from the very beginning, by a vast production of manuals and pamphlets designed to guide photographers, whether novice or experienced, in their pursuit of the perfect shot. Clément Chéroux has elevated this rudimentary literature into a springboard for a broader reflection on photographic errors. All these manuals, in fact, show a surprising continuity in the mistakes to avoid, listing the same warnings like a timeless refrain, indifferent to the passage of time and technological advancements.

Inadvertent shots; over- or underexposures; blurring; veiling; aberrations; clumsy framing. Setting aside the criteria that lead us to judge a photo as more or less successful, every error can become a clue to better understand the photographic device and its relationship with reality. Moholy-Nagy was well aware of this opportunity. Rather than considering errors as problems to be solved, he believed that the imperfections and accidents of the photographic process should be explored and amplified to reveal the unexpected virtualities latent in photographic materials and their processing. For the Hungarian painter and photographer, the camera possesses the ability to reveal phenomena that escape our usual perception, such as distortions and deformations. Photography, therefore, provides us with a pure optical image, while the eye tends to integrate this image with our intellectual experience through formal and spatial associative links.

The idea of a pure optical image suggested the possibility of eliminating, through photography, the symbolic and expressive connotations associated, for example, with traditional painting. This awareness of photography’s potential permeated the various avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, which employed photographic errors as artistic tools, each with its own distinctive accents and forms. Among these, Man Ray was undoubtedly a pioneer, while later figures such as Bertrand Lavier, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter found in the extensive catalog of photographic errors a new aesthetic to investigate. Among photographers, Bernard Plossu incorporated technical errors into his expressive language, using cheap cameras, poor lighting conditions, and shots taken from moving vehicles to multiply the possibilities of inaccuracies and oversights.

The error returns to a meaning that now seems less immediate: that of wandering, of errancy, transforming into the ability “to search for something and, having found something different, to recognize that what has been found is more interesting than what was initially sought.” As Chéroux emphasizes in his essay, to err means to put oneself in a position to make mistakes and to be willing to welcome accidents as true photographic epiphanies.

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