The Muffed Target – #6
Welcome to the brand new home of The Muffed Target.
Yes boys and girls, you read that right. The blogger who created this meme decided she no longer wanted to keep running it, for perfectly good reasons of her own, and yours truly jumped on board. She very graciously said I could take it over. Mahalo my friend. I do appreciate it.
Now, I don’t expect this to become an overnight sensation. If the lack of participation in Portrait of Words is any indication, I’ll be lucky to get three people playing along. But you know what? I could care less. I do what I wanna do and that is what matters the most to me. That is why I keep Portrait of Words going too. My creativity, or lack thereof, is down for all to see, read, comment on and critique. It brings me much pleasure. And the ones who do play along every month are excellent creators, and reading what they come up with brings me a lot of joy as well.
The rules
They are short, and they are deliberately loose:
- Each Tuesday, post a picture which is completely crazy — messed up, out of focus, badly framed, with nothing much in it — the kind you would normally delete on sight.
- It can be anything. Only the shoes instead of the whole person. A blurred building. A thumb. Whatever you’ve got.
- Then tell us the little story of how it happened, and what it was supposed to have been.
- Link your post on the list at the bottom so everybody else can find it.
That’s it. There is no judging, no theme, no prize and no deadline beyond “Tuesday, roughly”. The whole appeal of the thing is that everybody’s camera roll has a folder of these, and nobody ever shows them to anyone.
This week’s muffed targets
My two this week are squarely in the “completely crazy” category rather than the “badly framed” one. There’s a phone app going around that lets you push a face about until it isn’t a face any more, and once two people in a household have it, this is what happens. I did the first one. The second one is of yours truly, and it was done to me in return. Payback, as they say, is what it is. I hope you enjoy them.
Why a meme like this survives
Looking at it from a distance, the reason The Muffed Target kept going — and the reason it was worth taking over rather than letting it die — is that it asked for the opposite of what everybody else was asking for. In 2010 the whole photo-blogging world was tilting towards the best shot: the sharpest, the most saturated, the one worth a wall print. A weekly slot for the worst shot in the folder was a small act of resistance, and it produced better stories than the good pictures ever did. A picture that went wrong always has a reason it went wrong, and the reason is usually funnier than the picture.
If you want to see how far the other direction can be taken, the Library of Congress photographic collections are a good afternoon. Then come back and post your thumb.
The list is open. Add yourself, go and look at everybody else’s, and leave them a comment while you’re there — that last part is the actual point of all of this.
Hey, it’s only my opinion.
A Hui Hou