"1973 - bad photo of Mike" 1973

Sometime in December '73, someone snapped this picture of a person named Mike. I'm thinking about how photography itself is a process, a kind of making that’s so much about chance. The way the light hits, the film, the development process. All that can create something unexpected. Look at the redness bleeding through here! It's like the photo is blushing. It makes me wonder what the day was like, what the relationship was between Mike and the photographer. All those human feelings, seeping into the image. It’s “bad” maybe, but that mistake is also what makes it interesting. This feels like a precursor to the work of someone like Gerhard Richter, who also messes with photography, blurs it, scrapes it, makes it something else entirely. “Bad” art can be so much more telling than anything too polished. It shows the hand, the heart, the mess of being human.