BLUR/ INDISTINCT/ UNSHARP

Blurred image

Much of the work is characterised by a blurred, indistinct or unsharp quality. This is a deliberate photographic making strategy with the camera being used to select, smooth, intensify, manipulate and highlight. There is joy in describing something indescribable.

Often close ups or macros, the work is deliberately out of focus and features bokeh (the aesthetic quality of the blur in out of focus areas of an image).

Close up unsharp image

It sometimes includes blur caused by motion or the light from the flash or should use a flash setting but doesn’t and many other technical “faux pas”.

The bluriness becomes a proposition challenging and disorientating the viewer, inviting them to experience the image with its ambiguity, lack of detail or clarity around the image source. 

Motion blur with light

The work perhaps softens a harsher reality or bestows ”beauty” on humble or everyday objects or situations. A key tension within the practice however, is that the subject of referrant of the images is unimportant in relation to the visual end product.  This aspect of the practice is discussed in a further post on looking, seeing, aesthetics and beauty.  

In Art and Photography by David Campany, he writes on photographer Uta Barthes: “Barth’s images explore connections between the physiology of seeing, the photographic image and our visual habits of looking. Here the camera is focused at close distance, leaving us with a generalised “background” on no-specific space. For Barth, seeing is inseparable from the processes of memory through which we look for meaning.”

Gerhard Richter is often cited in theoretical context related to the concept of blur, the indistinct and unsharpness in contemporary fine art.

An article in Art Daily entitled “International Artists Deal with Unsharpness in “Blur After Richter” at Hamburger“, comments: “Blurred surfaces, dissolving contours, hazy appearances and indistinct motifs: More and more often images that are out of focus appear both in contemporary painting and photography.”

Out of focus

On Richter, it comments: “In the process of (un-)finishing his paintings, Richter raises questions about what a picture is able to reflect at all, whether it carries a signification or if it merely represents its own, seductively beautiful surface. For quite some time, the theme of the blurred image is no longer exclusive to Gerhard Richter. As the many, differing works in the exhibition show, the phenomenon of images that are, apparently, out of focus has, to the contrary, become a characteristic and even determining element in contemporary art.”

The article summarises: “Blurry pictures present their motifs in a state between apparition and dissolution, between memory and forgetting.”

In Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art by Stiles and Selz, Gerhard Richter writes: “This outward hazyness is probably due to our incapacity, as mentioned before. I cannot describe anything more clearly about reality than my own relation to reality. And this has always something to do with hazyness, insecurity, inconsistency, fragmentary performance, or what have you. But this does not explain the pictures – only perhaps the cause for painting them. Paintings are something different, they are never blurred. What we consider being indistinct is in fact inaccuracy and this means being different in comparison with the subject painted. But since paintings are not made in order to compare them with reality, they cannot be indistinct or inexact or different (different from what?). How can color not be sharp on a canvas, for example?”

Abstract painting

Comments on blurriness in visual art are also made in the exhibition information for Out of Focus. After Gerhard Richter – Hamburger Kunsthalle in an article entitled “The phenomenon of unsharpness”: “In the fine arts, images that appear out of focus are a means to irritate the viewer, as the pictures’ content becomes increasingly hard to identify. Blurry images do, however, equally offer a new freedom for the viewers’ imagination, associations and individual interpretations. Certainly, unsharpness raises a significant number of questions relevant today. Apart from Gerhard Richter we here present twenty three artists who pursue these issues and employ unsharpness and its aesthetic potential in different ways.”

“In the twenty-first century the fine arts react to the extremely high speed with which images can be recorded, processed and transmitted by creating a new unsharpness. This is a means by which both image production and perception can be decelerated as motifs are defamiliarised, distorted, and unveiled.”

Image on a digital screen

“Less precise, unsharp images that only convey a general impression or an atmospheric impression stimulate the subconscious, latent inner images in our memory more effectively than sharp pictures will. The brain completes vague hints.”

“This is what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein referred to when he remarked: “Well, can an unsharp image always be replaced by a sharp one to advantage? Isn’t the unsharp image more often just what we need?”

Unsharp image

In After Nihilism by Dickhoff again on Gerhard Richter, he comments: “What we see here as blurriness is imprecision, and that means being unlike the object portrayed.”