Through a broken lens: the photographer dreaming in double exposures
Jude Marlowe drops a vintage Pentax 67 onto the concrete floor of a Sydney share-house kitchen, and a star-shaped crack splits across the front element. What should have been a costly mistake becomes the beginning of a visual practice. Marlowe, who splits time between the inner west and a tiny studio above a Brunswick Street record store in Melbourne, began pointing that fractured lens at the world and pressing the shutter twice, refusing to let the broken glass define what the camera could do.
The results are layered, soft, and strangely tender. Subjects appear behind other subjects, moments stack on top of moments, and the world seems to fold in on itself. A kookaburra perches across the silhouette of a child's face. A surfer walks into the swell of a Bondi sunrise that lives three months in the past. The cracked lens smears every edge, but it also opens up a strange new depth that digital editing alone cannot manufacture.
There is a quiet philosophy running through the work. Marlowe talks about photography as a way of holding two truths at once, the way a person holds grief and joy, or how a city can feel both familiar and unknown. The broken glass is not a gimmick but a permission slip, an invitation to stop chasing sharpness and start listening to the smudges and streaks that a perfect lens would normally erase.
In a country that has long chased the sun-drenched clarity of postcards, this work feels like a gentle counter-argument. Australian light is famously harsh, but Marlowe is less interested in the bright noon and more in the indigo of late dusk over Fremantle, the green of an overgrown Surry Hills courtyard, or the golden smear of a late autumn afternoon in Adelaide's parklands. The broken lens softens all of it, asking the viewer to lean in rather than step back.
The accident that became a signature
It started on a humid February afternoon in Sydney, with a borrowed 105mm portrait lens and a too-hasty step backwards. The crack was a single line at first, then spidered across the glass after a second bump against a doorframe. Most photographers would have sent the lens off for repair or shoved it in a drawer. Marlowe, who had been chasing a particular soft-focus look for months, took the camera out the next morning to the Glebe markets and shot an entire roll over two hours.
The negatives came back looking like memories. A flower seller vanished into the shape of a hand reaching for change. A mother's face dissolved into a child's, both laughing at once. It felt closer to a visual diary than a series of portraits. From that weekend onward, the broken glass stayed on the front of the camera, sometimes swapped for a second cracked lens with a different pattern, occasionally replaced with a deliberately sand-blasted optic bought from a collector in Adelaide.
The mechanics of layering light
Double exposure has been around since the earliest days of film, when photographers wound the same frame through the camera twice. Marlowe works mostly on a medium format Hasselblad, exposing one image, then without advancing the film, layering a second image over the top. The cracked lens adds a third layer of unpredictability, smearing and refracting light in ways that no preset filter can replicate.
The photographer is honest about the frustration. A frame can feel perfect in the viewfinder and arrive on the contact sheet as a mess. Out of ten frames, two might work, and out of those two, one might hold the exact emotional chord the photographer was chasing. The process is closer to a kind of visual fishing than careful planning. There is a long stretch of walking and looking and waiting, and then a single, accidental moment when the light, the subject, and the crack align.
Different broken lenses create different effects, and Marlowe keeps a small wall of them taped above the desk.
| Lens Damage | Visual Effect | Best Subject | Working Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single hairline crack | Subtle vertical smearing, slight halos | Portraits, hands, fabric | 1.5–3 metres |
| Starburst shatter (central) | Soft star points, dreamlike bloom | Flowers, lanterns, city lights | 2–5 metres |
| Edge chip with internal fracture | Wavy distortions at the borders | Architecture, trees, water | 3–8 metres |
| Sand-blasted coating | Even fog, lowered contrast | Beaches, fog, overcast skies | Any |
| Saltwater immersion | Organic streaking, unpredictable flares | Sea spray, rain, fog | Variable |
The cracked glass does not just soften; it also smears, refracts, and occasionally haloes highlights in a way that the photographer describes as letting the light slip sideways. This is the language of chance, and Marlowe has made peace with it.
A visual language of soft collisions
The resulting images do not feel like accidents. They feel like carefully held together poems. The double exposure technique and the cracked glass work together, each adding a layer of softness that prevents the photograph from ever feeling sharp or confrontational. The viewer is invited in rather than pushed away.
The subjects tend to be people in quiet moments. A young man on a tram in Melbourne, half his face overlapping with the window's reflection of passing graffiti. Two friends laughing in a Brunswick backyard, one of them ghosted across the other. A child asleep on a Sydney ferry, her silhouette drifting into the harbour. The work consistently explores that strange territory where one thing becomes another, where the boundary between self and surroundings grows thin.
Rooted in Australian light and place
The Australian landscape is unforgiving in its brightness, and most local photography either embraces that glare or hides from it. Marlowe does neither. The cracked lens becomes a way of holding the country's famous light gently, almost as if the photographer were looking at the scene through watered silk.
The work has appeared at the Head On Photo Festival in Sydney, in a small group show in Hobart's MONA-adjacent spaces, and in print features across the country. The photographer also runs occasional workshops from a converted shed in Byron Bay, where students bring their own broken lenses and learn the patience of slow film. There is a growing community of Australian photographers, including a few surf shooters from the Gold Coast, who are exploring the same territory of softened, layered imagery, often in conversation with experimental filmmakers from the Australian Centre for Photography's archive. An upcoming feature in Azay Art Magazine brings the cracked-lens portraits to a wider international audience, and Marlowe is preparing a small book of the Byron workshop images for an end-of-year release.
Connections beyond the camera
The philosophy at the heart of the practice reaches well past photography. There is a long lineage of artists who have found beauty in broken or imperfect materials, and Marlowe counts poets, ceramicists, and floral designers among their closest references. The acceptance of damage as part of the work, rather than a problem to solve, links the project to a broader conversation happening across creative fields.
A recent piece on Mass Musings about A Conversation with a Florist on the Art of Arranging Imperfect Blooms touches on similar territory, exploring how wilted petals and crooked stems can become the most moving parts of an arrangement. The same quiet principle runs through the cracked lens: not everything that is whole is beautiful, and not everything that is broken is ruined. A hairline fracture, held in the right light, can become the place where two worlds lean into one another and stay.