There's something I understand about it, even if it runs against almost everything I was trained to believe as a professional. I understand the desire to feel the feeling of the imperfect. In the imperfect lives the opportunity to see the real, and in this age of digital perfection the real seems to be in short supply. The analog processes I work with now — paper negatives, contact printing, the process of creating an image in a camera that was built around the time I was born — are not precise. They are responsive. The paper sees differently than film. The development process which relies on chemistry that shifts with temperature and time and the vagaries of the process in each new day in the darkroom. I have made peace with the fact that I am in a conversation with these materials.

But there is a difference between a process that rewards patience and study with a particular kind of unpredictability — one that you earn your way into over years — and a process that delivers unpredictability as a product, pre-packaged, available for purchase this afternoon.

What the young photographers are buying is the sensation of relinquishing control. What I have tried to build, over a long time, is a relationship with materials deep enough that I know why something happened — even when I didn't plan it. That makes for real serendipity, the happy accident I look for.

I think about this when I consider what actually gets handed to someone at the end of a portrait session. Not the print exactly, though those matter. What gets handed over is evidence — evidence that something real happened, that a particular person existed in a particular moment, that someone was paying enough attention to witness it and hold it still.

The error-films simulate that feeling. The light leaks and double exposures and scratches say: this was real, this was imperfect, this was not made by a machine. That's a hunger I recognize. It's the same hunger my clients bring when they ask for something that doesn't feel like everything else.

The difference is whether the imperfection is purchased or realized.

I'm still wondering about what I saw. But I think it's telling me something about why the work I'm doing with the Paper Negative Project matters — not because it's old, or slow, or difficult, but because the errors in it are mine. They came from somewhere. They mean something, even when I can't fully explain what.