MIS-TAKES: A STUDY IN FILM AND IMPERFECTION

Back when film was king, it was pretty easy to mess up. Opened the back of the  camera too soon, blurred the focus, wasted frames just to kill a roll. A hundred ways to ruin a shot, a hundred ways to make a mistake. And I made them all. I used to stash those screw-ups away, figured no one would care. The real gems—the perfect shots—those were the ones that mattered.  Or so I thought. Then years passed. I dug through the archives, box after box, thousands of images stacked like bad habits. The so-called perfect ones? Forgotten. Just more of the same. But the mistakes, the accidents? They crawled back up to the surface, screaming for another look. I threw them on the light table, stacked them, let them bleed into each other—portraits, skate shots, random blurs—one spilling into the next. And there it was. Something better than perfect. Something real. This collection isn’t polished. It isn’t clean. It’s the wreckage, the misfires,  the beautiful disasters.

These are my MIS-TAKES. - BALLARD