The Mistake in

Photography:
Patrick Pound,
Jackson Eaton
and the
Paradoxical
Self Image
Daniel Palmer
15
 The Mistake in Photography
According to a recent book on snapshot photography, there
‘are now no more “mistakes” in the image archive’.1 Appar­
ently, digital habits of viewing, deleting and retaking are
driving images towards a kind of inhuman perfection.
But fortunately, human behaviour remains unpredictable
and even digital cameras make mistakes. The other day,
for instance, I accidentally pressed the shutter-release
button on my digital SLR while the lens cap was still on
(I realise my use of this antiquated device already tells you
something). The camera, not quite intelligent enough to
recognise the lens cap itself, correctly sensed that the light
level was exceptionally low and kept the shutter open for
several long seconds. As a result of my all-too-human
failure, the digital sensor scrambled to register any vestigial
photons to turn into electronic pulses and digital image
data. Eventually, the mirror descended with what seemed
an unusually loud and empty clack. However, viewing the
resulting ‘image’, I saw a more or less regular, striated field
of fuzzy pink and purple pixels [fig. 1]—as if I had closed
my eyes while staring at the sun. Evidently, the algorithms
inside the camera were confused. But it made me wonder.
Is this hallucinogenic image what photography has become
in the age of code? Is this the dark truth of digital light?2
Whether or not my purple haze is an indexical image
is surely no longer an interesting question. The pixels
represent a complex relationship between technology,
algorithms and light far beyond the scope of my current
concerns. My interest here—the nature of the mistake in
photography—is far less technical and more concerned
with human errors and aesthetic conventions. Think, for
instance, of all those books around ‘good’ composition that
proliferated in the post-war years, famously parodied by
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 Daniel Palmer
John Baldessari in his 1967 photo-canvas Wrong, which
shows him standing with a palm tree coming out of his head
and a single capitalised word below it that says ‘WRONG’.
I am interested in how the possibilities for such untutored
mistakes in photography are progressively being removed by
the various automations that now facilitate image making.
My argument is that these automations inevitably change
what it means to photograph. As digital cameras become
more and more sophisticated they increasingly remove
decision making from the photographer—even, in some
cases, making them completely unnecessary to the basic
process.3 As we know, more and more photography today
does not involve human operators (think red-light cameras,
security cameras, robotic cameras, etc.). At the same time,
everyone with a mobile phone is a photographer now, and,
as if in resistance to their obsolescence, many of these
people regularly take pictures of themselves.
fig. 1
The process of deskilling the photographer gained
pace with Kodak in the 1880s, epitomised by their brilliant
marketing slogan ‘you press the button we do the rest’.
However, Kodak—whose success was based on a consumer-
friendly method of pre-loaded roll film—simply shifted
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The Mistake in Photography
adjustments in exposure to the printing stage (‘the rest’).
The first camera to feature automatic exposure appeared
in 1938, but it was prohibitively expensive, and auto-focus
cameras did not appear until the late 1970s. By the 1980s,
almost no skilled work was required of a human operator
of an instamatic or SLR to produce sharp and correctly
exposed negatives. Writing about this development in
the mid-1990s, at the precipice of the digital era, Julian
Stallabrass romanticised the erstwhile skilled amateur
photographer’s activities as a zone of compromised but
nevertheless non-alienated activity, and bemoaned their
demise into instrumentalised gadgetry.4
In the new century, digital cameras have taken
automation to a completely new level. For instance, in-built
smile recognition software tells us when people look happy,
removing the need to ask subjects to say ‘cheese’. Optical
image stabilisation removes the need for a photographer
to remain still when taking a picture. Recognising that the
time-consuming decision-making labour of photography
now lies primarily in the editing rather than the taking,
Google even pioneered automatic editing on its social
media site Google Plus, promising to privilege photos of
people recognised to be in a user’s closest Google circles.5
Similarly, Apple’s iPhone 6 features a ‘burst’ mode that
takes 10 photos in a single second (a feature perfect for
‘burst selfies’, according to Apple marketing head Phil
Schiller6). Crucially, the task of selecting the image(s) to
keep can be outsourced to the software, for blink and smile
detection in burst mode ‘allows the camera to recommend
the most appropriate shot from the series’.7
We are now accustomed to being recommended
things by computers, which is to say by (often networked)
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 Daniel Palmer
software. Amazon’s ‘recommendation engine’ has helped to
make it the most successful bookstore in the world. You buy
one book, it recommends another based on an aggregated
history of user choices. YouTube recommends videos to
watch based on how your demonstrated tastes align with
others. However, the idea of the camera recommending the
most ‘appropriate’ image seems a little unnerving—perhaps
because of the intimate association between photography
and memory. And yet, the technology of the camera is
simply following its own black-box logic. As Vilém Flusser
famously argued, the camera is a programmable apparatus
that paradoxically programs the photographers who use it.8
In Flusser’s terms—contrary to the marketing myth—
photographers are functionaries to a technical program,
rather than creative visionaries. Undoubtedly, like the
emergence of photography itself in the early nineteenth
century, automations express broader cultural and political
imperatives.9 Most obviously, aside from minimising mis­
takes, automations are designed to reduce labour time. In
this sense, automation represents an inherent distrust of
human agency. As networked software becomes increasingly
‘intelligent’, the technical program of photography remains
the reproduction of visual clichés, but becomes more of a
communicative act in the present rather than a way of
recording memories. The ephemeral photographic mes-
sages of Snapchat exemplify this new logic.
Within this intense visual present, life is consumed
and the self is performed. All of this underlies why the
‘selfie’ has become the watchword of photographers.
Oxford Dictionaries named selfie as its word of the year in
2013. The Guardian described 2013 as ‘the year that the
selfie reached saturation point’ in an article featuring the
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The Mistake in Photography
year’s so-called ‘best, worst and most revealing’, including
celebrities (Kim Kardashian posing in the mirror) and
politicians (Barack Obama with other world leaders at the
funeral of Nelson Mandela).10 The same article complained
of the surfeit of ‘faux-sociological rationalisation pieces
about selfies’ that have appeared in the past few years in
newspapers (and, we might add, art and academic journals).
Selfies appear to be the ideal symbol of our hyper-vanity;
narcissism perfected as a popular distraction. The reality
star Kim Kardashian is perfectly attuned to this moment,
photographing herself obsessively for her Instagram feed,
and then compiling a collection of these images in a book,
sardonically titled Selfish (2014)—inspired by a similar
collection she originally gave to her husband.11
Selfies clearly belong to photography’s long and
intimate relationship with narcissism and celebrity. Such
tendencies were already identified in Charles Baudelaire’s
brilliant 1859 essay ‘The Modern Public and Photography’.
In that essay, Baudelaire took the Daguerreotype’s mirrored
surface as proof that photography makes narcissists of us
all. Baudelaire’s critique—in which photography breeds and
reproduces self-absorption—was based on the rapid success
of portrait photography. He was responding to the cultural
success of the Daguerreotype as a medium that enabled the
mid-nineteenth century bourgeois to look at its own ‘trivial
image’.12 Baudelaire detected in the ardent desire of the
masses for conformity a deceptive equality of social
representation.
Even if deceptively democratic, photography is a
‘generous medium’, as the photographer Lee Friedlander
once put it. When you think you are photographing one
thing, you are inevitably also photographing a whole lot of
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 Daniel Palmer
other stuff as well.13 In the nineteenth century, it was the
camera’s indiscriminate recording of all detail, the seeming
incapacity of the operator to select one detail over another,
which rendered the photograph outside the boundaries of
art. Later, precisely the same quality became one of its
defining features of modernist art photography, not to
mention an important part of its theorisation by Roland
Barthes.14 The mistake in photography, like the punctum,
is a particular result of photography’s indiscriminate and
contingent record of whatever is in front of the lens (even if
that happens to be a lens cap). Walter Benjamin famously
described this quality as ‘the tiny spark of contingency, of
the Here and Now, with which reality has so to speak seared
the subject’.15
Indexical mistakes in photography have preoccupied
Melbourne-based artist Patrick Pound. Pound is obsessively
interested in collecting, which he views as a way of cata­
loguing the world. Found photographs feature prominently
within his collections, and the act of photography itself
often becomes a way of categorising these images. For
instance, Pound has meticulously collected images of
people holding cameras, and another set of people holding
photographs. He has amassed a collection of photographs
of amateur models, but not just any kind: Pound only
collects images of models in which the imprint of a
waistband or sockline is visible on their skin.
For one of his best-known collage works, The
Photographer’s Shadow (2012), Pound collected photo­
graphs of amateur photographer’s shadows: dark figures
looming towards or behind the intended subject of the
image, hands up, caught in the act of photography. Pound
gives his overall collection of such images—parts of which fig. 2

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 Daniel Palmer
have also been exhibited as prints—the general title
The Photographers (1990–) [fig. 2]. Indeed, in their
accumulation, these unintentional self-images become a
portrait of the twentieth-century amateur photographer.16
To the extent that their charm lies in their apparent
innocence, they can be read as the opposite to the calcu­
lated pose of the selfie. There is also a gender shift: the
self-effacing father figure of Pound’s Kodak-era images has
long since given way to the self-conscious young woman
with a camera phone.17
fig. 3
In a related vein, Pound has a large collection of
photographs where photographer’s fingers or thumb
appear in the frame. Some of these he exhibited as enlarged
scanned images under the title The Photographer’s Hand
(2011) [fig. 3]. The result is a kind of homage to what is
perhaps the amateur photographer’s most common
mistake.18 Sometimes, to Pound’s obvious delight, a thumb
and shadow appear in the same photograph. In a perceptive
review of an exhibition that included these two tributes to
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The Mistake in Photography
‘crimes of photography’, Anna Newbold speculates that it is
as if ‘the people on the other end of these cameras haven’t
quite succumbed to the notion that they can’t be in the
photo’.19 Both forms of mistake can be viewed as accidental
portraits of the photographer, in which they are both
present and absent. They are more than that, of course:
Pound’s use of found photographs operate as icons of loss
on multiple levels. However, it is hard not to read them in
terms of our culture’s insistent, now digital, drive to create
the perfect image. Photographer’s shadows and fingers in
photographs are, of course, precisely the kind of thing that
digital software encourages us to immediately delete.
fig. 4
And yet, digital software doesn’t only delete.
Sometimes, it can be additive, as when the High Dynamic
Range (HDR) mode on cameras stitches together several
frames. But just as the web is littered with examples of
‘Photoshop fails’, auto-HDR mode often produces
accidentally uncanny results—as when moving subjects
appear as morphing spectres. For the Melbourne-based
artist Jackson Eaton, the ready-made archive of Google
Images represents a particularly rich source of imagery to
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 The Mistake in Photography
work with in an additive fashion. Long concerned with the
peculiar relationship of the self to others, and the restless
quality of our self image, Eaton has made various bodies of
work involving his own libidinal self image, including ironic
images of himself on t-shirts. In his ongoing series Melfies 2
(2014) [fig. 4], Eaton has plugged images of his body parts
and clothing into Google, sampled from selfies taken in
various mirrors. The process is simple: Eaton spots a mirror
(usually in a bathroom or clothing store), takes an image of
himself, then cuts up his body in Photoshop into geometric
parts and uses these images to do a reverse Google image
search. Google’s image-analysing algorithms struggle to
find an accurate match to the images submitted due to their
always contingent backgrounds, and generate bizarre and
seemingly random associations. As Eaton described it to me,
the resulting surrealist collages mask ‘the “biological self”
with technologically-matched yet erroneous images that are
usually saleable commodities and criminal faces’.
Eaton is interested in Lacan’s notion of the narcissist’s
frustration with the self as projected object. Just as narcis­
sism, for Lacan, is based on the child’s misrecognition of
its self-image, Eaton relishes Google’s misrecognition
of his body sections. His ‘becoming other’ speaks to the
obvious point that the popularity of selfies is at once
because they seem to empower individuals to control
their own representation, but also represent a symptom
of networked isolation—of geographically fragmented
individuals desiring connection through little screens. And
since self-presentation is fundamentally always in doubt,
since in order to conform and ‘blend in’ to established
stereotypes we invariably perform an act of mimicry, the
fig. 5 act of self-representation must be constantly repeated.
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 Daniel Palmer The Mistake in Photography
Moreover, if selfies, following Baudelaire, represent simultaneously fetishising spontaneity. Nevertheless,
a pseudo-democracy of appearances, Eaton’s work also mistakes still happen. Recently, a rare glitch in my iPhoto
speaks to the commodification of the self in online networks software saw all the thousands of images I had ever deleted
that are designed to monetise the expression of desire. suddenly return to my library. Once I had recovered from
Concentrated on corporate networks as Facebook, the initial horror, I discovered that some of the images I had
Instagram and Tumblr, selfies are fundamentally linked to carefully deleted turn out to be more interesting than those
consumer culture.20 Every day, users post about 130 million I had originally decided to keep. In photography, like life,
photos on Tumblr, and starting in 2014, the Yahoo-owned perfection is illusory and temporary, always haunted by the
media brand began to analyse all those images for clues to underappreciated mistake awaiting a second life.
users’ brand affiliations. Eaton’s work makes a mockery of
this process. When even the ideal self-image can now be
determined by software, Melfies can be interpreted as both
a critique of demands for self-representation online and a
parody of aesthetic outsourcing to algorithms.
Pound and Eaton are meta-photographers. Where
Pound redeems the photographer’s mistake, Eaton exploits
Google’s mistakes to reintroduce randomness and chance
into the contemporary self-portrait. Pound collects unique,
unintended traces of photographers, while Eaton works
with the overload of generic images online to see how his
own digital self-image mingles with millions of others.
Where Pound collects photographs precisely as they have
become obsolete and available for sale as decontextualised
objects on eBay, Eaton’s work suggests that the online
self—the selfie—is already determined by its relation to
objects of commerce. In both cases, the photographer’s
self-image, their residual trace, can be read as some kind of
resistance to their own redundancy in the face of ever
increasing automation. Automation, as we have seen, seeks
to homogenise image making. Its illusions of control and
efficiency are like the operating principle of contemporary
capitalism, seeking to eradicate chance from our lives while
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 Daniel Palmer
Figures
1 Daniel Palmer, Untitled (Mistake), 2014. Digital image file.
2 Patrick Pound, installation view from The Photographer’s Shadow,
2012. 1200 × 2580mm, inkjet print on archival paper. Courtesy
the artist.
3 Patrick Pound, detail view from The Photographer’s Shadow, 2012.
1200 × 2580mm, inkjet print on archival paper. Courtesy the artist.
4 Patrick Pound, detail from The Photographer’s Hand, 2011. Courtesy
the artist.
5 Jackson Eaton, Untitled from the series Melfies 2, 2014. Courtesy
the artist.
Notes
1 Catherine Zuromskis, Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images
(Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 2013), 315.
2 If I had left the lens cap on a film camera, the negative would have
been equally hungry to draw light, but the resulting ‘thin’ negative
would have resulted in a solidly dark positive or print.
3 I have written about this topic elsewhere. See Daniel Palmer,
‘Redundant Photographs: Cameras, Software and Human
Obsolescence’ in Rubinstein D., Golding J., and Fisher A. (eds.) On the
Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation (Birmingham:
ARTicle Press, 2013), 49–67.
4 Julian Stallabrass, ‘Sixty billion sunsets’, in Julian Stallabrass,
Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture (London: Verso, 1996),
13–39.
5 See Daniel Palmer, ‘Lights, Camera, Algorithm: Digital Photography’s
Algorithmic Conditions’ in Sean Cubitt, Daniel Palmer & Nate Tkacz
(eds.), Digital Light (London: Fibreculture Book Series, Open
Humanities Press, 2015), 144–162.
6 Victor Luckerson, ‘The iPhone 6 Will Have Apple’s Most Advanced
iPhone Camera Yet’, Time, 9 September 2014, accessed 16 September
2014, http://time.com/topic/iphone-6.
7 ‘Apple iPhone 6 Camera Brings Low-Light and Focus Improvements’,
Forbes, 9 September 2014, accessed 12 September 2014, www.forbes.
com/sites/amadoudiallo/2014/09/09/
apple-iphone-6-camera-brings-low-light-and-focus-improvements.
8 Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Anthony
Matthews, (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).
9 See Geoffrey Batchen. Burning with Desire: The Conception of
Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
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The Mistake in Photography
10 Stuart Heritage, Selfies of 2013—the best, worst and most revealing,
The Guardian, 12 December 2013, accessed 16 December 2014,
www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/dec/11/
selfies-2013-the-best-worst-most-revealing.
11 I thank Jackson Eaton for alerting me to this
illuminating detail.
12 In Baudelaire’s inimitable words, ‘our loathsome society rushed, like
Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on the metallic plate’.
See Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Modern Public and Photography’ in
Alan Trachtenberg (ed.), Classic Essays on Photography (New
Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 86–7. On Baudelaire’s
motivations, see Pierre Taminiaux, The Paradox of Photography
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 49.
13 ‘I only wanted Uncle Vern standing by his new car (a Hudson) on a
clear day. I got him and the car. I also got a bit of Aunt Mary’s
laundry and Beau Jack, the dog, peeing on the fence, and a row of
potted tuberous begonias on the porch and seventy-eight trees and a
million pebbles in the driveway and more. It’s a generous medium,
photography.’ Lee Friedlander, ‘An Excess of Fact’ in The Desert Seen
(New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1996), 104.
14 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
(London: Fontana, 1984).
15 Walter Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography’ [1931] In
One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcot and
Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1979), 243.
16 Where Lee Friedlander had intentionally produced a series of playful
photographs of his own shadows and reflections in the 1960s—a
self-reflexive deconstruction of the medium of photography published
as Self Portrait (1970)—Pound simply collects the readymade archive
of amateur versions.
17 A recent study of selfies around the world has confirmed that women
take significantly more selfies than men, and that most are taken by
people under the age of 25. See Selfiecity, accessed 10 September
2014, www.selfiecity.net.
18 I discovered, researching this essay, that the prolific Dutch designer,
publisher and artist Erik Kessels has recently devoted Volume 13 of
his ongoing self-published series In Almost Every Picture to this same
theme of fingers obscuring their subject. The 2014 book is subtitled
Attack of the Giant Fingers. See www.kesselskramerpublishing.com
31
 19 Anna Newbold, ‘Patrick Pound’s Collected Works: Telling Tales’,
Inkblot, 14 October 2011, accessed 10 September, 2014,
www.inkblotreview.blogspot.com.au/2011/10/dad-jokes-of-patrick-
pound.html.
20 See Marco Bohr, ‘Deconstructing the Selfie’, Visual Culture Blog,
30 March 2014, accessed 1 April 2014, www.visualcultureblog.
com/2014/03/deconstructing-the-selfie.

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