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.

blurry photo of love

My digital camera takes some very blurry pictures. As autofocus becomes more automatic in the future, I will retain this camera for its ability to snap the shutter just after coming out of focus. Actually painting out of focus requires some work. Gerhard Richter, the most well known practitioner of this technique, achieves it, at least in the one case I've observed, by making horizontal striations through the still wet pigment. Out of focus representation is a 20th century phenomenon: until camera use became widespread there was no convention about seeing out of focuse. Unfocused seeing was wrong seeing and, even though 19th century photographers might have been conscious of it, they avoided it in their work for presentation. It could be that earlier users of the camera obscura also knew of this phenomenon, but they also avoided it: with perhaps the exception of Vermeer who used some out of focus effects such as sharp highlights and gauzy outlines. Steichen and Steigliez used soft focus in their early 20th century periodical, Camera Work: perhaps drawing on influence from Julia Cameron. Cameron is the earliest practitioner I can think of who left central aspects of her finished work unfocused. Medardo Rosso seems to use out of focus effects in his sculpture and he would be late 19th and early 20th century.
The first person to leave things flagrantly out of focus I can think of would be Man Ray and after him the surrealists. I should clarify that when I say out of focus I'm not referring to the phenomenon of blur. Blur is related and is common in photojournalism; I'm thinking of the blur we see in photos of the d-day invasion and in sporting events. Advances in technology have almost lost that effect for us. Advances in technology are almost returning us to the pre-modern visual convention where everything, even things far away, are in sharp focus with defined edges and recognizable details.
That said, I love the blurry woman pictured above very much.

2 honeymoon photos, one blurry, one focused

Annunciation

If only I had a better reproduction of this painting. I painted it back in 1999. It now resides in Birmingham, AL. Gabriel comes down in a flame of fire. Mary, well imagine: a young girl receives an angelic visitation and becomes pregnant. There's more going on here than meets the eye: it begs to be portrayed in a sensual, fantastic way.