Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Three blurry photos



My camera is capable of extreme out of focus effects. Here are three pictures I've taken over the last three years. At top is a photo of my homiletics professor, Anna Carter Florence (we were outside these baths in Budapest and we were waiting on the rest of our group to show up); in the middle is a photo from Troy Bronsink's ordination (I think Jami may be the figure in the background with the pink top and white skirt); and at bottom is Marc Quinn's marble statue on Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth of Alison Lapper, an armless pregnant woman he depicted nude (his rationale being that there is an underrepresentation of disabled people in art - a move on his part that I applaud. The BBC News quotes her as saying it was a tribute to "femininity, disability and motherhood.").
The blurred image provides us with mystery. A sharp focus image privileges our notion that we know what is going on in the space around us, and, by extension, in our souls. The blurred image questions our perception of space and calls into question our memory of events. Where the sharp image says, "here is definitive verifiable evidence, " the blurred image calls into question all attempts at certainty: what is solid is suddenly ephemeral, transitory, evanescent.
The blurred image is therefore more true, more existential, more open to reexamination. The sharp image is open to falsification: it is too easily emblematic of solidity and gives the viewer a false sense of certainty.

1 comment:

madsquirrel said...

Damn you!!! KAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHNNNNN!!!!