A couple of years ago I read a photography magazine article about images deliberately out of focus. Frustratingly, I can't remember where it was, and it wasn't exactly these:
http://phototechmag.com/photography-as-fine-art/
http://www.digitalcameraworld.com/2013/10/25/blurry-pictures-how-to-lose-your-focus-on-purpose-for-artistic-effects/
A photography prize had featured blurry photographs, leading to debate. Some photographers rail against a thing they have spent years of expertise eliminating and controlling being celebrated in contemporary work, but clearly, when it is done properly, deliberately out of focus or blurry photography is nothing new and can be very effective and atmospheric.
I greatly admire the German painter Gerhard Richter. He clearly uses the influence of photography and digital images in his work, and has the right level of blur, blend and focus.
Mahler. Gerhard Richter
Albertina. Gerhard Richter
Images accurately or expertly blurred reflect or reveal to us the nature of our vision, and what we are seeing. The image or painting can show more to us about how we see and what we are seeing, by reflecting to us that we see the world through the visual medium of the day. Painting and still considered images become more important the more we are steeped in images. It is often said that we are highly visually literate because we are bombarded with images, and yet there is so much more to an image that the surface layer or what it represents. The more we unpeel images, the more we reveal about our perception of them.
When I was taking all the photos of the Found Paintings, because they were outside and wherever I found them, they sometimes had what I might call variations in accuracy. The ones that ended up in the final cut included some a little blurry. I was thinking about Richter issues, and also some of the visual illusion ideas in The Object Stares Back by James Elkins.
Simply put, the clarity and photorealism of some photographs and paintings are towards the hyper real, and our actual vision is not like that at all, but a series of impressions and illusions which we image is crystal clear, especially since photography guides our modern sense of vision. An extreme example would be Ansel Adams and his all-in-focus landscapes, taken with a tiny aperture so that everything seeps in. What's not to love about them. We may think that's how we really see, but we only have a rather small field of visual focus, much smaller that our entire field of vision.
Wilderness. Ansel Adams
So in Found Paintings, because they merge, which sometimes produces the illusion of blur even in pin sharp images, I thought I would integrate a few slightly blurred frames, perhaps because I had learned to read them not just as blurred and defective, but as saying something else. To my eye they are blurred exactly right - not too much. What would be too much? It's a question of artistic judgement, and debate. And so they would pass almost unnoticed in the general slightly blurred effect, almost as subliminal blurring, making the eye assume they are focussed like the rest.
The Old School Photos - Class of Yesterday is a whole other kettle of mixed metaphors. I have long been fascinated by the interplay of positive to negative, and have explored that in work before. This extends the principle, perhaps to extremes, as most of the images now have aspects of both positive and negative within them, and as they merge through each other, there is a multiplicity of effects that will happen - positive to positive, negative to negative, positive to negative and negative to positive, and all with variations of tone and lighting. If it all sounds complicated, that's because it is rather. It's what I have been working towards and anticipating.
What happens in merging positive and negative and all the permutations of that in Class of Yesterday are some almost optical illusions that hardly look real, but could be replicated in a dark room - whiting out, the appearance of becoming three dimensional, abstracting even more than the slightly morphed images. I guess this is one of the reasons I make moving and not just still images - I adore this magical process, but it must be controlled or it becomes distracting and can cause unintended imagery to sprout up. The main feature is that the false blurring effect can get extreme - so two in-focus images, if they are merged in a certain way, appear to go out of focus. I don't want too much of that, but as an occasional feature it adds to the sense that the viewer is sure and then unsure of what they are seeing as the photographs fade in and out and the wall textures and colours change. Like overlapping waves where there is always something in and something out of focus - but more in focus. Perhaps I will add some stills to illustrate this later, although it's phenomenon which works in motion. It's a natural consequence of the type of work and layered images, and I just have to find my strategy. The viewer's eye will blend and assume images are in focus, or if not, will trust that focus will re-emerge.
10th September 2014
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