Are there really Happy Accidents?
Back in the day PBS used to have a show about painting featuring Bob Ross. The mellow voiced painter spent 30 minutes an episode painting relaxing landscapes as his soothing calm voice narrated his technique to his audience. Not sure anyone learned anything about painting, but everyone chilled the f out for a while and unlike pot, it was legal.
Fortunately in our current time of need, Bob Ross is making a comeback. Or at least his old shows are. What Bob Ross reminds us is that it is important to take things less seriously and actually enjoy the things you choose to do. He had several little phrases that became part and parcel of the show “Here’s a happy little tree” etc. Another one he was famous for “We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents.”
I get that for painting and many other creative arts. But does the same apply for photography? I think it does. Whenever the first time someone set up a tripod of a city scene and a bicycle rode through leaving a recognizable blur of motion, photography changed, it took another step forward in its standing among the arts. A medium that had begun as a way to chronicle reality, now found a way to convey essence about its subject matter.
Photography has advanced as an art because of the happy little accidents that added to our tool bag along the way. As they have become part of our tool bag, they cease being accidents and become deliberate, but in doing so they become part of what has the potential to constrain our creative growth.
We need to find out own Happy Little Accidents every so often. They don’t have to be new to the art, just new to us. Something that breaks us out of a routine and helps us see in a different way, reignites our “Beginner’s Spirit”. I stumbled into that earlier this year when I was doing a city walk in Madison and discovered the effect of layering Reflections into an image.
Last Friday we were back in Madison. I wanted to shoot a couple things with film. The old deserted filling station, the bridge over the Ohio, whatever presented itself on the river walk and then on Main street on the way back to the car. Based on my thoughts from last week’s post, I had planned to take a few more chances with tricky exposures on this roll. Things started out ok, then that thing happened…Where I didn’t quite get the film threaded correctly on the collection reel to start and the advancing reel kept forwarding the film not onto the spool but into the cramped collection space, folding the film over and over itself and into a cellulose accordion.
Hoping to salvage the first few shots I stopped shooting and enjoyed the pleasant walk on an early fall evening. I processed the film and decided to scan all the images just because. I wasn’t expecting much or I might have fished out the rogue dog hair that had found its way into the scanner chamber.
As I was reviewing the .jpg’s to determine what to import into Lightroom, the images that grabbed me the most were the images where the accordion folds clouded the cellulose. They sort of sucked me in. Between the timeless subject matter, the grain of the film and the cloudiness of the lens packet when shooting into the sun; the folds didn’t detract. They added something. Sort of like the aesthetic of watching an old super 8 film play on a projector or finding the skips and scratches on an old vinyl record endearing, not offsetting. Were these images taken 80 years ago or today. From a casual glance there was nothing in the image that would settle the question.
Not sure I would want to try to reproduce this with another roll of film, but the message is a little larger. It’s ok to to take chances, its ok to make mistakes. Mistakes guide growth. Growth is the point and the destination. If you ever feel like you got to where you were going, the next mistake will open your eyes and take you further.
The images below start before the accordion folds and end with them. I’m sure you will be able to tell the difference.