It has to be a little ugly
The worst feedback anyone can give me on an image is that it is clean. It is never meant unkindly, it is almost always said as a compliment, and yet every time I hear the same thing: nothing is happening in it.
A clean image is an image from which all the accidents have been removed. The framing is straight, the white is calibrated, the skin is smoothed, nothing sticks out. And the result is perfectly competent, perfectly presentable, perfectly forgettable ten seconds later.
This is the last thing I wanted to write in this series, and it had to come last. Because defending the flaw before having defended the rule is just an excuse for working badly.
THE SMOOTH
Let us start with the symptom, it has become impossible to ignore. Today you spot an automatically generated image by signs that have nothing to do with its subject: a symmetry too obedient, a light without incident, skin without a pore, a depth of field that was decided by no one. It is not failed, it is over-tuned.
The phenomenon has a name, and it is older than these machines. In 1970, the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori described what he called the uncanny valley, that dip in our affection into which fall the figures that almost resemble a human without quite getting there. What Mori observed is that discomfort increases with resemblance up to a certain point, then collapses. A clearly stylised figure bothers no one. An almost exact figure becomes genuinely painful.
I believe images work the same way. A sketch fools no one and makes no one uneasy. A perfect image that no longer contains a single human decision falls exactly into the dip.
The problem is not that it is too beautiful. The problem is that it no longer belongs to anyone.
THE ACCIDENT
There is a long tradition, in more or less every creative trade, of deliberately introducing disorder to avoid this.
My favourite example is a deck of cards. In 1975, Brian Eno and the painter Peter Schmidt published a pack of cards they called Oblique Strategies, to be drawn at random when stuck, each carrying a short and often disconcerting instruction. One of them advises honouring your error as a hidden intention. It is not a studio joke, it is a working tool, used in recording sessions for decades.
Photography has its textbook case. When Robert Frank published The Americans at the end of the fifties, the critics of his time reproached him for his technique: the tilted horizons, the blurs, the grain, the framings that cut people off anywhere. These are exactly the qualities for which the book became one of the most influential ever published. The flaws were not forgiven with time, they were recognised as the subject.
And then there is kintsugi, that Japanese practice of repairing broken ceramics with a lacquer dusted with gold, so that the crack becomes the most visible and most precious part of the object. The accident is not concealed, it is underlined. The repaired object is worth more than the intact one, because it has a history and the other does not.
A scar is not a wound. It is proof that something was crossed.
THE BLUNDER
It remains to understand why this works on us, and social psychology has a fairly precise answer.
In 1966, Elliot Aronson and two colleagues published an experiment that became a classic. Participants listen to the recording of a quiz show candidate, in two versions, one where he is brilliant, the other where he is mediocre. In some conditions, an incident is added at the end: the candidate spills a cup of coffee on himself. The result is what we know as the pratfall effect: the brilliant candidate becomes distinctly more likeable after spilling his coffee.
But the part that gets quoted much less is the most important one for us. The effect reverses with the mediocre candidate. For him, the blunder endears him to no one; it sinks him.
In other words, the flaw only makes endearing what has first proven its competence. That is the whole difference between a chosen blur and a failed blur, between an unbalanced composition and a botched one, and this difference is not in the image, it is in everything that surrounds it. The reader never judges a deviation alone; they judge it against what you have demonstrated elsewhere.
THE DIFFERENCE
That is why this text comes at the end and not at the beginning.
White is only a choice if you know what a margin does to reading. Grain is only a material if you know what you are letting in. A broken grid is only a gesture if it was held. A flaw is only an intention if everything else shows you could have done otherwise.
Outside of that, you are not defending an aesthetic of imperfection, you are justifying sloppy work, and one has to be honest about the fact that the line between the two is thin and cannot always be seen from the outside. The only thing that makes it legible is the consistency of everything else.
So no, this is not about sabotaging. It is about leaving a trace. A slightly dirty light left uncorrected, a framing that cuts where it should not and gives the true rhythm, a white too large that bothers everyone in the meeting and makes the page.
A dip spotted by a roboticist in 1970, a deck of cards drawn at random in a recording studio, a book of photographs found technically bad before being found major, a cup of coffee spilled in a psychology experiment, a bowl mended with gold. All of this describes the same thing: what attaches us to an object is almost never its success, it is the place where you can see it was made by someone.
And that is exactly what I am after when I work. Not the beautiful image, I never knew what to do with it. The one that has a flaw right where it was needed.
It is not perfection that tightens something in the chest. It is what almost failed.
To dig further. Masahiro Mori, for the uncanny valley, described in 1970. Elliot Aronson and his colleagues, for the 1966 experiment on the pratfall, reading carefully the part where the effect reverses. Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, Oblique Strategies, published in 1975. Robert Frank, The Americans, and if possible the reviews published at its release, which are worth the detour. And any book on wabi-sabi for kintsugi.
