Photography has spent much of its history trying to eliminate the things that sometimes make photographs interesting. Lens flares. Grain. Aberration. Softness. Dust. Light leaks. Technically, these are defects—things to be corrected, compensated for or removed. And yet, there is something about old glass that I find difficult to resist. The way light blooms around the edge of an image. The strange colours that appear when the sun sits at an almost impossible angle. The softness that arrives when a modern lens might have delivered perfect resolution. A good lens is supposed to disappear. Somewhere I like being reminded that it was there. The same thing happens in music. A track before it was made, Fingers running across strings. A note that wavers slightly into something perfectly in tune. The resonance of an old guitar. A room finding a way into the recording. For years, technology has been helping us remove these things. We can correct pitch, repair timing, isolate instruments and smooth away almost every trace of the circumstances in which something was made. Which is remarkable. But occasionally, after all that correction, I miss the evidence. Somewhere between the sun and the sensor, this photograph remembers that it has a body. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s imperfection. Imperfection is not inherently interesting, and a flaw is sometimes just a flaw.