The Joy of Crappy Photos

Of course I love having taken a photo that is clear, sharp, focused, perfectly composed—a photo that makes people ooh and ahh as they flip to the next month on the calendar and see it (the photo) as the image for a bright and promising thirty days of prosperity and good fortune.

I've taken approximately five such photos in my life.

So this is to celebrate photographs that are not simply out-of-focus, but had no chance of ever being in focus: photos taken from a moving car; photos taken at night from a moving car; photos that just look like the proverbial waste of film but which, thanks to digital photography, I can amass by the thousands. And of those thousands of blurry, grainy, compositionally-challenged, and just plain odd little moments, I find gem after gem.

These photos often inspire me to stop and write a haiku; when added to the photo image, they make a haiga. The two included in this post are from photos I took just last night, from the car, as my husband was driving with great skill and patience through the streets of Manhattan. The mannequins in the window I knew I loved; the man pacing in the foyer of a building waiting for someone, perhaps dreading having to go back out into the cold, was a gift. I just love photo ops such as these. Postcards of real life, out-of-focus, hurried, compositionless, ephemeral, beautiful, gone.

Sometimes I cheat a little and crop the photo. So a wee bit of composition may happen later. Like a memory, new with each remembering.

I included some of my crappy photos—which I guess I should call (for promotional purposes) "accidental postcards of real life"—in a small book I made several years ago. If you are interested, go to http://www.blurb.com/b/3306520-images and perhaps order a copy of Images for your very own.

Accidental, ephemeral, beautiful, gone. Life imitates art, yet again.