Guest Room:
Simon Baker & Aden Vincendeau

Guest Room aims to spark collaboration. Simon Baker, Director of the MEP (Maison Européene de la Photographie, Paris), is teaming up with his colleague Aden Vincendeau.

Together, they have developed the following framework for your submissions: "Happy accidents: embracing mistakes".

An aesthetic effect for some, and proof of a lack of technical knowledge for others, the photographic mistakes are a compelling alternative way of understanding the medium in all its diverse aspects from making photographic images, to exhibiting and publishing them. Scarcely considered during the second half of the 19th century, photographic faults gradually acquired a certain notoriety at the beginning of the 20th century when surrealists like Man Ray found a new way of reading and using the ‘ghosts’ in Eugene Atget’s images of old Paris. From Man Ray’s Atget to Daido Moriyama’s epic collection of ‘errors’ Farewell Photography, accepting and embracing involuntary faults has long since established itself as a deliberate way of making new and surprising aesthetic effects. "Happy Accidents: Embracing Mistakes" is interested in all manner of new and original ways of accepting things that happened by accident to become the basis of new works.