When you look back at your high school graduation photos, which are you favorites? Are they the ones of you and your friends, standing in a posed line with practiced smiles? Or are they the ones of you laughing, playing with each other’s tassels, robes wrinkled and caps askew?
I much prefer looking back on ugly, goofy selfies than perfectly posed and filtered photos. I believe that a photo will never truly capture a moment but does have the power to come close to capturing the essence of that moment. And I often find that the worse the photo is, the better it is at capturing the feeling I had when taking it.
Two days ago, I came back from class at 4:00 pm on a Friday, flopped down on my bed and passed out. Three hours later, I woke up. I was disoriented. Sweaty. I opened my phone to a whole series of pictures of me drooling onto my pillow. My roommates and I have a folder called “After Hours” where we all add candid and notoriously terrible photos of each other. We’re two months into school, and the folder is filled with pictures of us sleeping, studying and scootering around. I’m certain that in five years, when I’m missing this time of my life, I’ll much prefer these awful photos to any posed pics we’ve taken together.
I treat it like a hobby, the way I collect bad photos of my friends and myself. It’s a sign of love when I take a badly angled, zoomed-in photo of someone. I love to look back at photos of moments that were too fun to take a clear photo of. I love a little blur, a little unattractiveness. It’s real, it’s fun and it’s what I’ve found to be the best way of capturing and documenting my life.
Have you ever gone to a party and taken a picture of a friend busting a move on the dance floor? That photo, a year down the line, will bring much more joy than the curated photos you took before the event, no matter how pretty you looked. And what’s so great is that anyone with a phone can adopt this habit, too. We are all capable of capturing perfect moments in an imperfect way.
It’s true that most of us are glued to our phones these days, and although that often makes me want to time travel back to olden times, I believe that we should make the most of this quick and easy access to a camera. It’s not hard to take a photo. We can take millions. It’s not the 1900s, where if you blinked in a photo, you’d be captured like that and only that forever. If we detach ourselves from the idea of taking a perfect photo to properly capture beautiful moments, we can take funnier, more meaningful photos and have more time to actually live in the moment.
Bad photos are a form of love and a joy to distribute (consensually, of course). So go take a bad selfie with your best friend. Start an “After Hours” folder with your roommates. Take a blurry candid of your mom or a lopsided landscape. Collect these photos, and send them spontaneously to those you love. I believe it’s the closest you can ever get to really, truly, capturing a moment.