The history of photography has always been intertwined with randomness. Even the invention of the medium itself owes much to chance. In The History of Photography, Newhall reports the accidental discovery by Daguerre in 1839 of the effects of mercury vapor, which was essential for developing the daguerreotype. William Henry Fox Talbot’s calotype process emerged from a failed experiment; he found that a faint image on paper coated with silver chloride could be chemically developed after he re-treated an unsuccessful exposure. This accident revealed the principle of latent image development, foundational to later photographic techniques. As Larry Schaaf notes in Out of the Shadows, Talbot’s discovery of table salt as a fixer came when he noticed unevenness in the images exposed on his coated papers.
The Origins of Photographic Serendipity
These kinds of episodes, where luck and chance generate discoveries and inventions, have been defined by the term serendipity. It was first used by Horace Walpole in a letter he wrote in 1754. The word comes from the island of Serendip, which, according to legend, was ruled by three princes who made discoveries of things they were not searching for, often by accident. Beyond photography, serendipity has catalyzed landmark scientific discoveries—Alexander Fleming’s accidental identification of penicillin being the most iconic example.
Surrealism and the Aesthetic of Accident
The concept of randomness was particularly embraced by the surrealist movement. Man Ray often said that he discovered solarization by turning on the lights in his darkroom by mistake. Though Man Ray later admitted this origin myth was fabricated (solarization was already known), his perpetuation of the story underscores the surrealists’ reverence for accident. Embracing this philosophy, Man Ray used expired film, mixed chemicals arbitrarily, and leveraged mistakes as creative elements, challenging the idea of the photographer as an all-powerful author. He would often present his discoveries as mere “manipulation errors”, thus putting into question the traditional sense of authorship. Man Ray was not the only one embracing serendipity. Artists like László Moholy-Nagy used errors and accidents to reveal the “structure” of photography. The shadow of the photographer, the blurring of focus, and the distortion of perspectives became tools for understanding the medium’s principles. The error, therefore, became a path towards knowledge, rather than just something to avoid. After them, in the history of photography, many artists used errors or provoked them as a tool in their creation process.
What is clear is that the interplay between randomness and intentionality is a key theme in understanding photography. Even when a photographer aims to control every aspect of the process, they cannot entirely eliminate the element of chance. Unexpected objects in the frame, technical faults, sudden light changes, all define the final aspect of the image. Whether they make positive or negative changes to the photograph must be decided by the artist and by the viewer. Sometimes it happens that an accident gives a new meaning to the image as seen by the viewer, that was not intended by the photographer. Talbot himself believed that a crucial artistic act was to recognize those moments where the ordinary becomes picturesque. He described the photographer’s activity as an act of recognizing a good composition from the world, instead of creating one on paper, so the photographer relied on good fortune. These small details that inadvertently sneak into the photograph sometimes become for the viewer what the French philosopher Roland Barthes calls punctum. The punctum is what really sets an image apart, the incidental detail that emotionally ‘pierces’ a viewer, enriching the viewer’s experience with the image.
The Digital Transformation
This rich history of serendipitous discoveries and artistic accidents raises an intriguing question for our contemporary era: how does randomness manifest in modern image-making? As photography entered the digital age, the nature of these ‘happy accidents’ underwent a fundamental transformation. While digital photography has significantly reduced the possibilities of traditional technical faults, new forms of chance and unpredictability have emerged. Digital sensors have eliminated concerns like poorly mixed chemicals, accidental multiple exposures, or unexposed film. Partly because of the excessive accuracy of digital images, recent years have seen a resurgence of analog photography and the rise of movements like Lomography, a style characterized by the use of lo-fi film cameras and chemical experimentations aimed at getting unpredictable results. While digital photography maintains certain imperfections, like pixel noise and image compression, they have a much smaller impact. There are artists, like Mishka Henner, who use digital glitches as conceptual tools in their work.
On a different note, computer-generated images (CGI) are produced in a fundamentally different way than photographs. While photographers capture the world with all its defects, CG artists must design each scene from a blank canvas. However, even in this controlled environment, chaos still has its place. When envisioning their ideas, CG artists often purposefully introduce randomness through fractals and algorithms to simulate natural phenomena, from fluid dynamics to crowd behavior. Despite the technical advancements, even modern rendering engines, designed to create the most complicated scenes, still leave room for unintended artifacts.
AI and the New Randomness
Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in Generative Artificial Intelligence for image creation. Tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney allow artists to generate images through text prompts – written descriptions that guide the AI. These systems analyze vast datasets of existing images, learning to recognize and combine visual patterns. The artist becomes a curator of chaos, steering the AI’s creative process while embracing its unpredictable nature. These tools, often built on architectures like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or diffusion models, have one thing in common: chaos. They all rely on latent space exploration, a process of navigating vast, abstract datasets to transform random noise into coherent images. The process is inherently stochastic. Each image is unique, because these tools introduce randomness at each denoising step, meaning identical prompts yield varied results. Artists often navigate through the generated images to find serendipitous results. The only limit is the existing data: since the models only know what is available in their dataset, the randomness is bounded by it.
So, is chance less relevant in modern image-making? Far from it. I argue that chance is still present, just in different forms. While the silver halides and chemical reactions of analog photography have given way to pixels and algorithms, the fundamental relationship between chance and creativity remains. The tools may have changed, but the dance between intention and accident, between control and chance, remains at the heart of image-making. Now artists are no longer just waiting for happy accidents—they are actively cultivating them, using technology to explore the fertile ground between randomness and intention.
Further reading
Campany, D. (2012). Art and Photography. Phaidon.
Crawford, K. (2021). The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press.
Manovich, L. (2002). The Language of New Media. The MIT Press.
Newhall, B. (1982). The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present. The Museum of Modern Art.
Schaaf, L. J. (1992). Out of the Shadows: Herschel, Talbot, and the Invention of Photography. Yale University Press.
Talbot, H. F. (1835). On the Nature of Light. London and Edinburgh Philosophical, 7(37).
Talbot, H. F. (1844). The Pencil of Nature. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans.