Whilst on a quest for perfection, the concept of mistakes courting controversy and thus engagement came up for photographer, Neil Bedford. From this concept was born his latest football shirt documentation, ‘ERROR’, which purposefully skews the perceived norm to create mayhem for football fans.
‘In beauty there will always be an error.’
We’ve all been there – you post something on social media but you make a minor mistake. And yet it’s that mistake that's fixated upon, making your post outperform some of your other posts for which you’ve poured your heart and soul into. Sure, the interactions are largely negative, pointing out where you’ve gone wrong and ridiculing you for it – but any engagement is good engagement as they say; in turn that engagement allows the algorithm to think the content is something people want to see, and therefore it’ll be pushed by the platform to more people, allowing that content to potentially go viral. And therein lies the basis of Neil Bedford’s latest photography exploration, ‘ERROR’.
Georgi Kinkladze, Manchester City hero from yesteryear, on a Manchester United shirt but with a Chelsea badge? Or a Liverpool shirt with Everton crest featuring “Wise”? Then take the names from their usual position on the back and slap them front and centre for a jarring take. And finish by mixing up some of the traditional colours...it all contributes to that feeling of wrongness, of unease with what you're looking at. And that's exactly what Bedford is gunning for...
“As a photographer who’s spent 15 years aiming for a perceived perfection, this opened my eyes to how online success could potentially be achieved through purposely misinforming people, overriding perfection by being substituted with errors,” Bedford explained.
“For ERROR I have had six classic football shirts made that most football fans will know are not typically correct. The wrong colours, mixed with the wrong teams, mixed with wrong players and the wrong positioning of those player names, in order to create absolute mayhem with football supporters online.”
And so, with ‘ERROR’, Bedford taps into the modern paradox of digital culture—where imperfection drives interaction and mistakes fuel engagement. By deliberately distorting the sacred aesthetics of football shirts, he invites fans to wrestle with their own instincts, questioning why something so obviously ‘wrong’ can feel so captivating. In a world obsessed with authenticity yet driven by algorithmic chaos, ‘ERROR’ cleverly exploits the tension between tradition and disruption, proving that sometimes, the greatest reactions come from getting it wrong.
See more from Neil Bedford on his Instagram account, here.
