What is Imperfection?
I find often when I am walking in the forest with my camera that I am attracted to capture the imperfect, such as this image. I don't know why, but I feel it is beauty that is too easily overlooked.
Things that are not uniform, clean or conforming to the way they ‘should be’ are too easily ignored or rejected initially.
Yet it is often these that I take the most time to consider, then capture as an image. How does the light work best, or not! What is distracting or drawing attention from this subject? Not even thinking about things like camera settings.
So I ask you, look at this image closely.
Look at it in parts, possibly zoom in if you want and scan across it. What did you notice now that you didn’t before at first glance?
Yes in places there is light and shade and variations in colour. There is brightness and distortion, and what some may say is corruption of form. There are things that are just moments in time, along with those more permanent marks as a reminder of the life impacts.
Now as you pull back to look at the whole image can I ask you, do you think it looks the same as before? Has seeing things, the marks, the wounds, the imperfections in detail changed your initial impression?
Is there beauty? I think there is. And I am left thinking, what is imperfection? Is it always the negative, as we seem conditioned to think.
When something we make is not perfect we can choose, if we wish, to start over. And that is not a bad thing.
We also have the choice to accept and move on. Recognise the reality of those ‘imperfections’ as a part of the whole. And maybe as well to then question the benefit in keeping focus or condemning those parts of ‘imperfection’.
I guess it may not always be possible to do that in every case of course. There are times where things can not be overlooked. But scrutiny and condemnation are two different things.
For me what makes this image is not just the light, or my framing or the little editing done.
But simply that it is the imperfections of the subject itself that made its story complete.
Makes you think!
(Words and Images, Copyright Kevin Palmer 2023)