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.
Above is a photo of how the seminary home in Lexington looked last Spring, and below is how it looked in the publication Colored Light, a book about the seminary's history published in the 1930s. Though the photo on the bottom is blurry, a product of my bad digital camera, you can make out architectural features and changes. The rear rooms are gone, as is the porch. And the chimney is different. It is the chimney, the fact that it is a central chimney that cinched this building and not some other as the building in the photo. Also there is a big placard on the building claiming that it is the seminary's home - but the building is in such delapidation that I found the placard beyond belief. It amazes me just how much a structure can endure before it collapses in a shambles. The soil underneath this building is 200 years old, as far as it being undisturbed soil. When this soil was covered over by flooring the Creek still dominated the area, or had only recently been removed. This is soil that last saw sunlight when Georgia was the frontier. If this building lasts another ten years in its current state I will be surprised.
