Controlled Randomness
Designing a fixed procedure whose results are left to chance, then choosing among the outcomes for the finished work.
Controlled randomness in photography is a working method in which the photographer fixes the rules, materials or conditions of image-making while leaving specific outcomes to chance. Chance has accompanied the medium since its invention, but its deliberate use took shape in the interwar avant-garde, when photographers such as the Serbian Surrealist Vane Bor let liquids spread unpredictably across photograms. After World War II the approach developed in experimental darkroom practice, which used material reactions to generate form, and from the late 1960s in Conceptual Art, where rules, games and fixed numbers of attempts took the place of compositional judgment.
In practice, chance enters through one of three routes. The first is a rule set in advance. John Baldessari's Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts) (1973) limited the work to the thirty-six exposures of a 35mm roll, from which he chose twelve, and for As Far As I Could Get (1996–97) John Divola triggered a ten-second self-timer and ran from a tripod-mounted camera without knowing how far he would get. The second is a material process whose reactions cannot be fully predicted. For Lakes and Reservoirs, Matthew Brandt soaked chromogenic prints of lakes in the American West in water collected from each site for days, weeks or months, letting it dissolve the dyes and crack the emulsion, and removed each print once it reached the state he wanted. The third is relinquishing control of the frame. For Hunter (1972), Daidō Moriyama photographed Japan's roads from the windows of a moving car, so that speed and passing encounters decided much of what entered each frame. Selection remains decisive, since the photographer decides which outcomes enter the finished work.
Robin Kelsey's Photography and the Art of Chance (2015) treats chance as constitutive of the medium. Controlled randomness turns this inherent chance into a deliberate condition of the work. Unlike the Snapshot Aesthetic, where accidents of framing and focus arise from speed and casualness, it builds chance into the method in advance. It also differs from generative photography, which Gottfried Jäger named in 1968, long before generative AI, for abstract images produced in the camera or darkroom by systematic procedures, since such work aims at fully programmed results. Kelsey has described digital processing as a kind of conquest over chance, which mediates it to an unprecedented extent.
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