Art as error: Stephen Dupont’s photographic mishaps celebrate chance and imperfection

In Fucked Up Fotos, Australian photographer Stephen Dupont (born 1967) curates a career’s worth of mishaps–double-exposures, light leaks, X-ray clouding, corrupted computer files–and discovers spectacular beauty in the damage.

Spanning 30 years, five continents and more than a dozen countries, from Afghanistan to Papua New Guinea, from China to Romania, these eclectic images create a veritable catalog of everything that can go wrong in a photograph, whether through user error, mechanical malfunction or deliberate sabotage. At the same time, they return us to the primal magic of photography and its ability to capture something beyond what was intended. The result is a visual mediation on chance, and a celebration of the accidental, the unpredictable and the imperfect.