Unscharf

The other day in the bathtub, my favorite place for inspiration, I listened on YouTube to an artist who has philosophized about the blur in her pictures. Thereby some old patterns immediately went off with me and dismissed the spoken as „total nonsense“. But wait a minute, what did I just hear that for? I have learned to question my own patterns to change them. In the process, I’ve noticed that I’ve been taking „sharp“ pictures for 35 years. It was more like a competition according to the motto: „the sharpest picture wins“. My assistant usually deleted the out-of-focus pictures on the laptop without asking.

What’s the point of always being sharp? My first idea was, because we see everything sharp with our eyes. But when I took a second look, I realized that it’s also an issue of control for me. When we see something in focus, we can make it clear, we can identify it, or at least we think we can. Out of focus though, makes us doubt, makes us not see it clearly, leaves so much more room for interpretation, lets US tell the story to the image, lets us go much more into feeling.

I tried it out. I went out with my Leica, stepped out of my comfort zone and deliberately photographed out of focus images. The result is like a new world. A world without control, without evaluation, without judgment. Just a play of light and shadow, or maybe a play of love and mindfulness.