Gallery: imperfection and impermanence

There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in
Leonard Cohen

Perfection is the state or quality of being completely free from faults, flaws, or defects, according to the Cambridge Dictionary. That sounds pretty amazing, right? And yet as photographers we are often drawn more to imperfection than to perfection. Why would that be?

Imperfection can add character to our images. Perfection can be beautiful, but it can also feel sterile, predictable and somehow lacking in personality. It is often the small irregularities that make something interesting and memorable.

Wabi Sabi

The Japanese recognise this in their concept of Wabi Sabi. This is an approach to art, based on Zen philosophy, that finds beauty in the understanding that everything is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. To expand on this:

Imperfect = there is no such thing as perfection
Impermanent = nothing lasts forever
Incomplete = everything is always changing

To understand this there is no better example than the art form known as kintsugi. In this, a broken piece of pottery is repaired with gold-infused lacquer, highlighting the crack and its imperfections rather than hiding them. The cracks tell a story, making the pottery more interesting and more beautiful.

Wabi Sabi and photography

So what has this got to do with photography? Should we always be seeking out the perfect flower, the freshly painted house, the sunniest of landscapes? Or won’t our photos be more interesting if we recognise, as the Japanese do, that there is no such thing as perfection and that there can be more beauty in imperfection?

Sofia sets us the Lens Artists challenge of doing just this, to look for ‘the imperfection of things that are flawed or unsightly, the impermanence of things that have past their prime, the incompleteness of the transitional, capturing moments instead of the whole thing’. Here, from my archives, are some examples of when I did just that. I have chosen to focus on impermanence in particular, highlighting examples of dilapidation or neglect in buildings (although these could easily also be illustrations of imperfection) and of the transience of natural things.

All the photos in my galleries are captioned with the location where they were taken. You can click on any one of them to see the caption and scroll through them all as a slideshow. If viewing on a phone you may need to click on the speech bubble bottom right to read the caption.

My feature photo was taken in Randazzo, Sicily.