The dangers of perfection
For other examples:
Bill Brandt p. 29
Lee Friedlander p. 71
Daido Moriyama p. 79
Robert Frank p. 121
Badly composed, blurry and brilliant. The technical flaws in this image of the D-Day landing are what make it so powerful.
In this case, war photographer Robert Capa photographs the event up close, in the thick of the madness. While the soldiers waded ashore with their rifles, Capa did the same, armed only with a couple of cameras. Later, his negatives were accidentally burnt in a darkroom dryer, but, rather than ending up in the bin, the few surviving images found their way into the history books.
With photography, there’s always the temptation to strive for perfection and disregard – or worse, delete – anything that falls short. But this desire for perfection can choke your creativity.
Sometimes you can’t have it all and it’s far better to capture the right moment with the wrong settings, rather than the wrong moment with the right settings.
Capa’s ‘crappy’ images of that day have a rawness that do more than just document the event. They capture what it must have been like to live it.
Landing of the American troops on Omaha Beach.
Normandy, France.
Robert Capa
June 6th, 1944