Out of Focus Intuition
There is something that I’ve always found very attractive about the out of focus photograph, perhaps for the same reason that abstraction is teasing and evocative, like a ghost in the machine. But, why are images evocative at all? How do we make the translatation from vision to imagination? After viewing an online lecture out of Columbia university about the need to marry the neurosciences with the humanities, I was up last night lying in bed thinking about which side of my brain controls the different aspects of my interactions in the world.
So, I’ve been scanning my photographs for the ones that evoke these questions of the elusive connection between emotion and the visual. For me anyway these photographs are visual poetry, or the brain teaching me how to feel.
Perhaps what we are most attracted to in an abstract image of any kind is the moment of discreet clarity that may be within it. What is in focus, what shows itself in the chaos?
If you want to check out that lecture it is the first in the series: science + art= http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/vforum/02/perception_memory_art/index.html