Some of the photos you see were taken a very long time ago, so now they look quite weird. On some, the photographer managed to pick up a quite outstanding combination of foreground and background. And well, some of the photos can really be called "cursed", because it is difficult to understand what is happening in them.
"Some of these photos look clearly staged," says Ivan Strakhov, a Ukrainian photographer who was approached by Bored Panda to comment on the content on the Cursed Images page. "There is a special genre in cinema called mockumentary. As the name suggests, these are pseudo-documentaries with fictional topics. Examples of such films are the horror Blair Witch Project or Woody Allen's pseudo-historical film Zelig."
"And just in this mockumentary genre, some of these photographs were taken. Somewhere you can see that people deliberately stood up or sat down in the appropriate position to make it look funny or strange, somewhere there are obvious traces of post-processing. But about half of the pictures obviously look like they were taken completely by accident - and this is their value," Ivan believes.
“In fact, when people now constantly walk around with smartphones, and many do not let go of them at all, just a few seconds are enough to see something funny or unusual and take a picture,” comments Ivan Strakhov. "And sometimes it turns out to be very interesting in general - a person photographs something ordinary, for example, their friend, car or pet, and then, having opened the photo, they see that there is something strange in the background."
Of course, professional photographers react faster - especially those who shoot sports events or weddings. "They're both about anticipation, action and reaction. If someone gives a toast, there will be a reaction. If someone tells a joke, I'm looking for where the laughter is going to come from," says photographer John Solano in an interview with Nikon USA website. An ordinary person with a smartphone will react way slower - but still, this speed is quite enough to get something very strange and really exciting.
