In Praise of Blur
“Color is descriptive, black and white are interpretive,” said Elliott Erwitt.
Between a technical error to avoid and a claim to an artistic form, over time, photographic blur has evoked one thing and its opposite.
With the first technical advances in photography, blur rhymed with error, imprecision, and approximation, while painting had already largely embraced it (notably through the sfumato technique).
This confrontation around blur and sharpness would fuel a contradictory, even conflicting, dialogue between painting and photography. A dialogue that ultimately freed photography from the imperative of producing sharp images.
The way was then opened for photography to finally enter a freer and more interpretive field, and in turn, elevate the practice of blurring to the rank of an artistic discipline.
This series therefore invites you to a double subjectivity of the gaze: By building a bridge between the interpretative dimension of black and white, and the non-formal representation of reality through the prism of blur.
