I attach two photographs taken on a vintage 1950s Kodak Brownie 127 film camera in the course of a project that I am curating called ‘Only The Sunny Hours: Contemporary Photography with a Brownie 127‘.
The two photographs have accidental light damage due to the old camera not being light-tight. However, the result is that a genie-like cloud appears to rise from the large vase being held by members of my family.
I have been trying to experiment with the use of colour in my work and have been experimenting with photography for this purpose. I turned on the TV one day and Masterchef was on. The colours of the foods were amazing and I thought I would get my camera out. I didn’t want the photographs to be of food so I decided to change the focus so it blurred the image.
It turns out the images didn’t really work in relation to what I was trying to do but I can’t bring myself to delete them. I like the abstract quality of them but it wasn’t necessarily what I was trying to achieve.
My error was an accident. I was taking a long exposure of a video projection, I must have moved or jogged the tripod without realising and this image happened. The pink light in the video definitely wasn’t as crazy looking as it is in the photograph! I was projecting on my radiator to distort the image, but my accident has definitely done that job for me instead.
I was photographing a painting – a work in progress – to consider later on and away from the studio, but mistakenly shot this image in the process. I have kept it because it reflects the chaotic nature of that morning, when I was trying to squeeze in another layer of paint around cooking breakfast and packing a bag for the weekend.
I made a number of errors with zoom lenses on my compact camera and decided to edit them together into an abstract video. It can be viewed here
This was the very last photo I took of my grandfather before he died. Little did I know that would be the case. An error in my camera caused me to be unable to advance the film without double exposing. I took one portrait of my grandfather and quickly fired off a second. The resultant image is evocative of his closeness to and now distance from me.
In this series of images I was exploring how it is possible to purposely obliterate images on film using a potent mixture of chemicals. For these images, I boiled silica gel, lemon juice and potassium ferricyanide (a photographic bleach). I enjoy the abstract colours and shapes which arise from these experiments, though I felt particularly bad boiling a film which I had found in a camera at a car boot sale. Who is the person in the photograph and why is he holding his head? Will I ever know?
Philip Preston
These photographs were taken in gale force wind on top of the North Yorkshire Moors. The two photos are of the same scene but one contains the ‘error’. The blur was caused by a strong gust of wind. The image was accidental but adds a somewhat gothic atmosphere to this already beautiful bleak scene.
“His Absence Place” involves two boats that leave from two sides of the ocean aiming to meet someday somewhere. On each of the boats was a fixed camera, programmed to take an image every 5 minutes, 24 hours a day, during a journey of more than two months. Though the result was foreseen, an unexpected “mutation” occurred. Some of the images took on a digitally distorted shape and color. It was especially interesting to me because it was in opposition to the rigid process and structure of the project.
In Pursuit of Error 