038 · An Impression of Something Real

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An Impression of Something Real: Reflections on Blur, Equivalence, and Two Exhibitions in Barcelona

I was in Barcelona for the Experimental Photo Festival, and while I was there I made time for two exhibitions — Desenfocado, or Out of Focus, at CaixaForum, and the Minor White retrospective at KBr. They were on my list for completely different reasons and I didn't expect them to have anything to do with each other.

They've sat oddly together in my head ever since. This post is my attempt to work out why. It's less a review than a set of reflections, and it goes some way into theory.

Two shows, briefly

Out of Focus. Another Vision of Art came to CaixaForum Barcelona from the Musée de l'Orangerie by way of Madrid, curated by Claire Bernardi and Emilia Philippot. Seventy-seven works by fifty-eight artists — painting, sculpture, video, works on paper, and a smaller number of photographs. Giacometti, Richter, Rothko, Thomas Ruff, Bill Viola, Boltanski, Soledad Sevilla, Mame-Diarra Niang, Alfredo Jaar. It runs to the end of September.

The curatorial argument is that blur amounts to an alternative history of art after 1945: an aesthetic of transitoriness, disorder, incompleteness and doubt, with a political edge to it. What art does when the certainties erode.

The Minor White show at KBr is the opposite kind of exhibition in almost every respect. A single-artist retrospective of around 250 vintage prints, the first major survey of his work in Europe, fifty years after his death. It's built around his sequences, drawn mostly from the Princeton archive, curated by Carlos Gollonet.

One show is a thesis assembled from fifty-eight artists. The other is one man, sharp as a scalpel, and — as I'll get to — the reason the first one is possible at all.

Blur has been in photography from the start

Out of Focus can't tell the photographic half of this story, and that's fair enough; it isn't a photography show. But the photographic half is older than 1945 and considerably stranger.

Softness in photography didn't start as a modernist gesture. It started as an argument about status. The Pictorialists of the 1880s and 90s put blur into their pictures deliberately, to make photography more art-worthy — to pull the photograph away from the mechanical record and towards etching, charcoal, paint. Emerson's Naturalistic Photography (1889) argued for differential focus because human vision doesn't resolve a whole scene evenly. Demachy and the gum bichromate printers went much further, working the print surface by hand until the photographic origin was almost incidental. Cameron had already been attacked in the 1860s for portraits that wouldn't resolve, by critics reading as incompetence what was actually an argument about how much of a person a picture can honestly claim to know.

Michel Makarius makes a correction here I keep coming back to. His Une histoire du flou: aux frontières du visible (Éditions du Félin, 2016) supplies the CaixaForum show with one of its section titles, and also quietly undercuts its premise. In eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Beaux-Arts vocabulary, flou didn't oppose sharpness at all — it meant a smooth handling of paint, as against the dry. The blur-versus-sharp polarity we treat as natural only crystallised around 1880, when instantaneous photography and Impressionism turned up together. The opposition is barely older than the medium that supposedly discovered it.

And it has swung back and forth ever since. Emerson recanted two years later with a black-bordered pamphlet called The Death of Naturalistic Photography. Group f/64 formed in 1932 explicitly against soft focus — Adams called Mortensen the Anti-Christ. Provoke formed against the well-made photojournalistic image. New Topographics went the other way again in 1975 — deadpan and sharp, aimed at the romantic American landscape the f/64 lineage had made canonical. Four swings, minimum. Anyone announcing a new turn towards grain and imperfection should check the date first.

Is blur really anti-real?

Blur gets called anti-realist a lot — in criticism, in workshops, in the way people talk about their own work. I don't think it holds up. If a photograph is an impression of something that was actually there, in what sense is it against the real?

Take a motion blur. Someone walks past, the shutter's open for a quarter of a second, the negative records a smear. Now take the thousandth-of-a-second version, where the same person hangs frozen mid-stride in a posture no observer has ever seen. The smear holds more. It holds duration. It's a physical trace of the whole event rather than a sample of one arbitrary instant inside it. Barthes’ ça-a-été isn't weakened by it — if anything more of the has-been got into the emulsion.

The frozen instant is the strange artefact, and we're so used to it we've stopped noticing. Nobody ever saw a horse with all four feet off the ground until Muybridge built an instrument that could show it. That was a good scientific result, and somewhere along the line we mistook the output of the instrument for the way the world looks.

Surreal is closer than anti-real, and even that's only half right. Surrealism departs from appearance to get at something underneath it. Blur departs from appearance without departing from contact — the light still came off the thing.

I want to complicate my own argument, though, because my darkroom doesn't support the tidy version. The kinetic darkroom prints put the blur in at the enlarger, not the camera: five seconds static, then the paper moves, or the head rises continuously through twelve. The negative underneath is a sharp street scene shot in bright daylight. Whatever those prints hold, it isn't duration recorded at exposure. It's motion that never happened, added afterwards, at two to three times the exposure to keep any blacks in it. Moving the paper gives you clean directional blur at constant magnification. Raising the head is a different animal — the inverse square law kicks in, the projected image expands from its optical centre, and the starting height always dominates while the ending height ghosts away.

So blur isn't one thing with one epistemic status. Camera blur is a trace. Darkroom blur is a claim. Both are honest, but about different things, and I'd rather keep that distinction than flatten it.

What blur actually rejects is resemblance-as-proof — the assumption that fidelity to how a thing looks, sampled at an instant at maximum acutance, is the same as fidelity to what it was like to be there. Two realisms. Sharpness serves the first well and frequently gets in the way of the second.

It runs through every genre

The other thing Out of Focus doesn't have room for is how completely this is distributed across photography, rather than sitting in some soft-focus corner of it.

In portraiture it's so normalised we've stopped seeing it. Shallow depth of field to dissolve a background is a phone setting now, and it's still a real assertion — that the world behind the sitter has no claim on our attention. Foreground blur is more interesting again: it puts the viewer behind an obstruction, makes them someone glimpsing rather than someone shown. And then there's letting the sitter go soft, which is Cameron's territory, and Sarah Moon's, and Bill Henson's, and which Richter borrows for Uncle Rudi — a portrait that dissolves because the sitter can't be looked at straight.

In street it's speed and refusal rather than reverie. Frank's grain and tilt, Klein's aggression, and above all the are-bure-boke — grainy, blurry, out of focus — of Provoke, three issues in 1968 and 1969 under Nakahira, Taki and Takanashi, with Moriyama joining from the second. Made in the middle of the Anpo protests. That work is the standing counter-example to any reading of blur as gentle. Moriyama's stray dog isn't soft. It's a picture made deliberately illegible by someone who didn't trust legibility.

In landscape, Sugimoto's Seascapes, where a long enough exposure leaves only the horizon; Wesely leaving a shutter open for years while a building goes up. In the nude and still life, softness strips the identity off the object and leaves mass, tone and weight.

Jackie Higgins’ Why It Does Not Have to Be in Focus (Thames & Hudson, 2013) maps where this had got to by the early 2010s. A hundred photographs, weighted towards the two decades before it — Sugimoto making fuzzy architecture with a nineteenth-century view camera, Vera Lutter's underexposed camera obscura, Paul Graham's blown-out American Night, Uta Barth focused resolutely on nothing. It reads now as a period document, which I mean as a compliment. And the argument under the survey is the right one: in an age when anyone with a camera can call themselves a photographer, an apparent lack of technique gets mistaken for a lack of sophistication. Her hundred photographers all work, in their different ways, against our expectation that a photograph is telling us the unadorned truth.

Minor White is the opposite case, and the reason any of it works

Which brings me to White, who ought to be on the other side of this argument entirely.

His prints are sharp. He came out of the West Coast tradition — Weston's Point Lobos, the f/64 inheritance, the immaculate large-format negative and the perfectly made gelatin silver print. By every technical measure he belongs with the people the Pictorialists were reacting against, and who were reacting against the Pictorialists in turn.

And his photographs are obviously not about their subjects. Frost on a window, peeling paint, a rock at Point Lobos, rendered with total clarity and doing something other than describing frost, paint or rock.

This is equivalence, inherited from Stieglitz — whose cloud photographs from 1922 onwards were among the first pictures made explicitly to free the subject from literal reading — and developed by White over the rest of his life into a working theory. His formulation, from Equivalence: The Perennial Trend (1963), is the one I can't stop turning over: one should photograph things not only for what they are, but for what else they are. He built sequences out of it, a “cinema of still images” in his phrase, because a single equivalent is too ambiguous to hold a reading and an ordered run of them constrains it, the way a chord constrains individual notes.

So White dismantles the lazy version of the blur argument. You don't need to defocus to escape literalism. He escaped it at f/64 with a contact print, by simply not caring what the subject was.

But I want to put it more strongly than that, because it's the thing I actually took away from the week.

The Pictorialists got to meaningful blur first — I've just spent a section saying so. But look at how they had to argue for it. Their blur meant something because it made a photograph resemble an etching or a charcoal drawing. The authority was painting's, and photography was borrowing it. Sixty years of soft focus, and the justification was always somewhere else.

Equivalence is the first account of why a photograph that declines to describe can mean something on photography's own terms, and White is one of the people who built it. If a photograph's meaning were tied to what it depicts, blur could only ever be degradation — information lost, description damaged. It's only once you accept that the subject is a point of departure rather than the destination that softness becomes a tool instead of a fault, and stays photography while it does it.

That's the permission Out of Focus is asking for on behalf of painting, arriving from the opposite end of the aperture scale. What both are objecting to isn't sharpness. It's the demand that a photograph describe — the assumption that its job is to report.

It's also the permission my own printing runs on, which I hadn't properly understood before that week. A lith print works by letting development run away with itself, so the highlights come up creamy and grainless while the shadows go gritty and warm — and the grain in the print isn't in the negative. Mordançage uses peroxide, acetic acid and copper chloride to swell the densest silver until the emulsion lifts into veils you then have to decide what to do with. Silver mirror toning induces in two minutes the metallic bloom conservators spend careers preventing. Every one of those is a departure from what the negative describes. Every one of them is only legible as a picture rather than as damage because equivalence made that reading available. Without it I'm not a printer — I'm someone ruining prints.

Pictorialists to pixel peepers

There's a version of the present neither show addresses, because neither is about the present.

Something like two trillion photographs were made last year, nearly all on phones. That's fine in itself — most speech is forgettable too, and we don't demand that conversation be literature. What interests me is that the serious amateur response has been, overwhelmingly, an arms race in acuity. Megapixels, MTF curves, corner sharpness at f/1.4, forum threads litigating microcontrast between two lenses whose outputs are indistinguishable in any print anyone will ever make. It's a category error, and an understandable one: a correct perception that the phone photograph is inadequate, followed by the conclusion that the inadequacy must be measurable.

The odd part is that the phone already made the aesthetic argument for us. Computational photography doesn't record light so much as infer a plausible image from it. The Samsung moon business in 2023 was the clarifying case — photograph a deliberately blurred, low-resolution moon on a monitor and the phone hands back a crisp one, craters and all, from light that never contained them. Remarkable thing for a camera to do. Not obviously photography.

So the device in most pockets makes images of unprecedented apparent sharpness that are, in part, invented. The Pictorialists’ objection — that the sharp lens isn't a neutral witness — turns out to have been proved by the sharpest lenses ever made, for reasons they couldn't have anticipated.

I think that's what the younger photographers rediscovering point-and-shoots and expired film are after too, whatever they say about aesthetics. Canon's PowerShot sales are up nearly sevenfold since 2022. The appeal of the bad flash photograph is that it couldn't have been generated. Its flaws are load-bearing. They're evidence of contact.

Which is where the darkroom comes in

I used to describe lith, sabattier and mordançage as interventions — things done to a photograph after the fact. I don't think that any more, and these two shows are part of why.

Jean-Pierre Sudre, who made mordançage an art form out of a nineteenth-century etch-bleach everyone else had written off as a fault, showed at MoMA in 1967 alongside Pierre Cordier. Cordier had invented the chemigram eleven years earlier by combining the physics of painting — varnish, wax, oil — with the chemistry of photography, without camera, without enlarger, in full light. That isn't a technique. It's a claim about what a photograph is: an object of silver and gelatin whose relationship to the world is physical, contingent and negotiable, rather than a window that happens to have got dirty.

Next to White it reads differently again. If the point is equivalence — photographing things for what else they are — then a mordançage veil isn't damage to a record. It's the print admitting what it always was: a chemical event that happened because light did something, once, somewhere. The subject supplied the occasion. The silver did the rest.

I've written before about the RA4 mordançage prints that won't stop changing in storage, and about impermanence being the most honest thing colour photography does. Same argument, different register. Indeterminacy of surface and indeterminacy of focus are refusals of the same demand.

Two things I want to keep in view

First, blur is a cliché now, and I'd rather say so before someone says it to me. It's a one-tap effect and a shorthand for depth. The bokeh-drenched portrait is as much a genre convention as the gum bichromate nude was in 1900, and just as prone to substituting mood for thought. The test I've settled on — and try to apply to my own prints without flinching — is whether the indeterminacy does work that clarity couldn't have done. Whether it's earned, arising from the encounter and the exposure and the chemistry, or applied, laid over an image that had nothing to say. Most blur fails that. So does most sharpness. I have a box of kinetic prints that fail it, and the honest reason I've kept them is that paper is expensive.

Second, and more seriously: softness can be an evasion. Sontag spent Regarding the Pain of Others worrying at the way aestheticising suffering lets the viewer off, and beautiful indistinctness is an efficient way of letting the viewer off. Alfredo Jaar's Six Seconds is the intelligent version — it comes out of a brief encounter with a young survivor of the Rwandan genocide, six seconds that can't be narrated clearly, and its refusal to show is itself an argument about what showing does. The unintelligent version is horror softened into wallpaper. Blur is never only formal. What you decline to resolve is a position.

Coda

I went expecting the Out of Focus show to be the one about photography and the White show to be about a photographer. It was roughly the other way round.

The question was never sharp or soft. It's whether you want the photograph to be a report — in which case resolution is the whole game, the phone has already won it, and it's inventing the craters — or an encounter, in which case focus is one variable among a dozen and not obviously the most important.

I got back to Helsinki and back to the darkroom, and pulled a lith print at what I thought was the right moment on the curve. It wasn't. The shadows had already started to race and the whole lower third went to black while it was still in the tray. I've kept it. Nothing in it is sharp, nothing in it is legible, and I can tell you exactly which second of that development it happened in.

References

Exhibitions

Desenfocado. Otra visión del arte (Out of Focus. Another Vision of Art). CaixaForum Barcelona, 21 May – 27 September 2026. Curated by Claire Bernardi and Emilia Philippot. [Originated as Dans le flou, une autre vision de l'art de 1945 à nos jours, Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris, 2025; shown at CaixaForum Madrid before Barcelona. 77 works, 58 artists.]

Bernardi, Claire, and Emilia Philippot, eds. Dans le flou, une autre vision de l'art de 1945 à nos jours. Paris: Musée d'Orsay–Orangerie / Atelier EXB, 2025. [Exhibition catalogue.]

Minor White. KBr Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona, 18 June – 6 September 2026. Curated by Carlos Gollonet. [First major European retrospective; c. 250 vintage prints, drawn largely from the Princeton University Art Museum.]

On Blur, Focus and Equivalence

Emerson, Peter Henry. Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art. London: Sampson Low, 1889. [The differential focus argument.]

Emerson, Peter Henry. The Death of Naturalistic Photography. 1890/91. [The recantation, printed with a black border.]

Higgins, Jackie. Why It Does Not Have to Be in Focus: Modern Photography Explained. London: Thames & Hudson, 2013. [One hundred photographs, weighted towards 1990–2010.]

Makarius, Michel. Une histoire du flou: aux frontières du visible. Paris: Éditions du Félin, 2016. [Argues the blur/sharp polarity only crystallised c. 1880.]

Richter, Gerhard. Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961–2007. London: Thames & Hudson, 2009.

Stieglitz, Alfred. Equivalents. Cloud photographs, 1922–1934.

White, Minor. “Equivalence: The Perennial Trend.” PSA Journal 29, no. 7 (1963): 17–21. [The source of the “what else they are” formulation.]

White, Minor. Mirrors Messages Manifestations. New York: Aperture, 1969.

Provoke, issues 1–3 (1968–69). See also Dufour, Diane, et al., eds. Provoke: Between Protest and Performance — Photography in Japan 1960–1975. Göttingen: Steidl / Le Bal / Art Institute of Chicago, 2016.

Philosophy of Photography

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. 1980. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. 1983. London: Reaktion, 2000.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

Steyerl, Hito. “In Defense of the Poor Image.” e-flux journal 10 (November 2009). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/

Carpenter, Tim. To Photograph is to Learn How to Die. The Ice Plant, 2021. [Discussed in 009.]

Process

Sudre, Jean-Pierre. Mordançage. [Developed from the nineteenth-century etch-bleach process; exhibited with Pierre Cordier and Denis Brihat at MoMA, 1967.]

Cordier, Pierre. Chemigrams, from 1956. [Varnish, wax and oil against photographic chemistry, without camera or enlarger, in full light.]

My Own Notes

011 · Kinetic Darkroom — intentional enlarger movement.

012 · Breaking RA4 Apart and 013 · Chromatic Archaeology — RA-4 mordançage and impermanence.

023 · Mordançage — the process, and its costs.

030 · Lith Printing — infectious development.

034 · Silver Mirror Toning — making the fault the picture.

Thanks for reading. If you saw either show, or you've got a view on where blur stops being meaning and starts being decoration, I'd be glad to hear it.

Jackie Higgins on Jorden Senior