Eric William Carroll: Human Error
Wednesday, November 14, 2007Eric William Carroll recently updated his website with a new project that he has appropriately titled Human Error. As Eric describes it,
Human Error is an exhibition in three chapters. ‘Tests & Arrays’ are attempts at tracing designs used to calibrate photographic equipment. ‘Dust & Scratches’ is a series of darkroom experiments that solely depict those sworn enemies of photography. ‘Sneezing & Crying’ is a series of photographs/video stills/self-portraits that depict myself either sneezing or crying. Together, this somewhat disparate group of work attempts to approach the topic of the mistake as something uniquely human and beautiful. Instead of trying to cover up the error, I’m putting my own faults front and center. It is my desire to embrace these slip-ups and acknowledge their own beauty.
Sneezing & Crying, Pigmented Ink Print, 32×40″, 2007 (from “Human Error”)
© Eric William Carroll
Tests & Arrays, Ink on Vellum, 11×14″, 2007 (from “Human Error”)
© Eric William Carroll
Dust & Scratches, Chromogenic Print, 16×20″, 2007 (from “Human Error”)
© Eric William Carroll
Lots of other interesting work can be found on Eric’s website (see Sunburn and Punctum/One Year of Taking Pictures).
I might add that Eric is a fellow blogger with good taste in music. And another little “fun fact” – he’s Alec Soth’s (R.I.P.) studio manager. Eric, should those of us who can’t make it to Memphis give up on hoping for the Tunnels and Birds images to appear on Alec’s website?
November 14th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
Wow. I really enjoyed looking at his work on his website. I appreciate the fact that he made work about photography. It makes me sad to look at the “Camera Obscure” work because film and darkroom days are fading. We are loosing the “process”. Now with digital, you take it, see it in an instant, and print it from a computer. Where’s the process? How do you truly understand photography when the process is fading? I also enjoy his “Human Error” series. Embracing mistakes as something beautiful is really what we all should do. There is no perfection, yet we keep looking for it. Thank you for sharing his work.
November 14th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
Stephanie’s comment got me to think along these lines: If digital (that is, the absence -or relative absence- of “process”) had been an option in 1839 we would’ve never had “process” in the first place. The paradox is that the process was there in the first place because we -humankind- couldn’t figure out how to do what we wanted to do (and what we can do now) without process. So the process, in the end, originally necessary, has lately become sort of a complicated artifice, redundant, inessential and contrived. Our problem is that, along the long and winding road to make things easier, we learned to love the process, and the look of its (sometimes unnatural) results (think of black and white, think of super large format where what you get is almost more than what you see with your naked eye). I will cling to large format and I will shoot with film and I will do the “process” as long as is possible (I love to cling to history, especially at a time when the vast majority converts), but that doesn’t hide the fact that sometimes I feel the strangeness inherent in embracing a tradition that owes its very existence to shortcomings that no longer exist. Of course, digital is still too expensive at some levels, and hasn’t yet overtaken analog in image quality, especially in large formats, but for how long?
Sorry Shane, got carried away, nothing to do with the original post…