The Muffed Target
Every Tuesday, post the photograph you would normally delete — and tell everyone how it went wrong.
The Muffed Target was a weekly photo meme, and it was the second of the two features hosted on this blog rather than merely played on it. It arrived in August 2010, handed over by the blogger who invented it when she decided she no longer wanted to run it. The changeover post is preserved in full and carries the rules exactly as they were written.
How it worked
- On Tuesday, post a picture that went badly wrong — blurred, mis-framed, half a thumb, only somebody’s shoes, a building at a forty-degree angle.
- Tell the short story of how it happened and what it was supposed to have been.
- Add your link to the list so everyone else can find you.
- Go and read the others.
There was no theme, no judging and no prize. The deadline was “Tuesday”, interpreted generously. Participation ran to a handful of people most weeks, and that was openly expected from the start — the takeover post said so in as many words and then said it did not matter.
Why the worst photograph is the interesting one
Photo memes in 2010 were overwhelmingly about the best shot. Scenic Sunday wanted the view. Weekend Reflections wanted the trick with the water. Everything pushed towards the frame you would print.
The Muffed Target pushed the other way, and it produced better writing for it. A good photograph tends to generate a caption. A failed one generates an explanation, and the explanation has a person in it — somebody was leaning out of a moving bus, or being handed a baby, or had just realised the lens cap was on. The rule that made the meme work was not the photograph rule at all. It was the requirement to say what it should have been, which turns every entry into a very small story about intention and failure.
There is an entire tradition of this in photography proper. The accidental frame, the light leak, the double exposure nobody meant — museum collections are full of them, and the exhibitions and teaching programme at the International Center of Photography are a good place to see how often the mistake became the technique. A weekly blog slot for the same idea, run by hobbyists with point-and-shoots, is a smaller version of a real argument.
What happened to it
The meme ran here through late 2010 and 2011, numbered week by week — entries as high as #29 are still linked from other blogs. It went quiet along with everything else as the blog wound down, and the final post in July 2012 closed the door on it.
The individual weekly entries were mostly not captured by the archive, which is why links to them land here rather than on the original post. Number six survived because it was the changeover, and because half the ring linked to it for the rules.
The other meme hosted here went in precisely the opposite direction: Portrait of Words asked for a month’s work and a proper story. Between them they covered the entire range of what a blog meme could ask of somebody.
What hosting a meme actually involved
From the outside a meme looks like nothing — a title, a rule and a link list. Running one is a weekly obligation that does not stop.
Every Tuesday the host has to post first, on time, whether or not they have anything. The link list has to be set up before anyone arrives, because the participants are checking at their own breakfast time in six time zones and an empty page loses you half of them. Then the host is expected to visit every single entry and comment on it, which is the actual work: five entries is forty minutes, and a busy week is longer. Do that reliably and the meme grows. Miss two weeks and it does not recover, because the people playing it have simply put the time somewhere else.
That is why memes changed hands rather than closing, and why the handover was treated as a proper event rather than an administrative note. The blogger who created The Muffed Target had been carrying it weekly, decided she was done, and rather than let it lapse looked for somebody who would keep the Tuesday. The changeover post here reads as slightly self-deprecating about the whole thing — the new host cheerfully predicted three participants — but the commitment underneath it was real and it was kept for the better part of two years.
It is also why the numbers in the slugs matter. A meme that has reached its twenty-ninth week has been posted twenty-nine consecutive Tuesdays by somebody who did not feel like it on at least a dozen of them.
Hey, it’s only my opinion.
A Hui Hou