Perfection in the imperfect and film photography

In Japanese philosophy wabi-sabi it is said that nothing in this world is perfect. This worldview nurtures aesthetics, imperfection and authenticity, believing that only through these concepts you can see the real beauty of the world, perceiving things the way they are, and not the way they should be in our opinion. In it’s core, the philosophy of wabi-sabi reveals how pointless is our eternal idealistic search of perfection.

As every form of art, photography does not perceive a mission of depicting the world precisely the way it is. With every snap of the shutter a photographer is trying to express their ideas or emotions, expose the pure rawness and inner beauty of everything that is around us, sometimes making it surreal in order to draw the attention of the viewer and change their perception of something that seemed trivial, mundane, familiar. Through a photograph an artist is trying to describe a place, a person or a moment without having any means of communication with the viewer but the photo itself. He takes up the role of a narrator, a storyteller of such, using his camera as a mediator between the listener and the story he is trying to tell. Often these stories are fictional, created by the photographer to share his perception of the world or the emotional state he was in while taking it.

Film photography, in my humble opinion, is the best at portraying the imperfection of which wabi-sabi and its core beliefs are talking about. It is all about being in the heat of the moment, taking a fast glimpse of that strange, somewhat surreal world that surrounds us and showing it, or, as a true narrator, describing it to the listener in the most truthful, straightforward way possible. In that honesty and genuine depiction lays its power. In fact, it functions the same same way we perceive the world as humans.

Every individual possesses different qualities, experience, skills, tastes and level of interest to what we see, but in general we all have a similar…

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