A few weeks back I was trying my best to avoid emails and thus stuck a podcast on.
I was listening to Colin & Samir interviewing Grammy award winning musician Jacob Collier, and early in the episode he referenced a concept he called “the fatigue of bright packaging. He didn’t massively expand on this term, but it got me thinking about the undeniable shift in popular culture that seemingly has lots of us lusting for the imperfect.
These days I prefer YouTube to Netflix. I listen to more albums produced and mixed in bedrooms than in studios, I check the score of Ryan Reynold’s 4th division football team before searching the Premier League results. More than any of this though, I’m finding I no longer care for photographs that try too hard for perfection, like this…
Photos trying too hard - for me - typically display a couple of symptoms:
They’re normally flawless. Void of noise, perfectly sharp, exposure bracketed, focus stacked and everything you think might’ve possibly needed cloning has been, be it footprints or floppy flowers.
They’re loud and dramatic. Blazing golden hour light, stretched out mountains and a model clad in a yellow anorak for good measure posing slightly unnaturallly. You’ve seen these shots. If these photos could scream for your attention, they would.
Anyway, I bring it up because thinking about perfection has become a huge part of my workflow, and while I’m doubly sure not everyone will agree with this take it’s been food for thought for me, in what is increasingly my quest for a portfolio full of scenes that look as though I’ve just stumbled across them.
It turns out the best way to build that is, well, to stumble, in the middle of the day when most do, warts and all.
James