Focusing is an interesting topic in Photography. It's certainly a yardstick for good photography, but sure it's not--and should not be--a dominant rule.
I would like start from the beauty of the words, which are always for me a boat in the sea of meanings from which I am gladly transported: "mettere a fuoco" ("put into focus"). This term loses its power in translation. What it meant precisely is burning with the force of light what is in front of us, to capture it in our photographs through our eyes.
I like to refer to an interesting and deep essay on photography by Riccardo Panattoni: "Black out of the image - Essay on photography and the anachronisms of the gaze" (Mondadori, 2013).
I would like start from the beauty of the words, which are always for me a boat in the sea of meanings from which I am gladly transported: "mettere a fuoco" ("put into focus"). This term loses its power in translation. What it meant precisely is burning with the force of light what is in front of us, to capture it in our photographs through our eyes.
I like to refer to an interesting and deep essay on photography by Riccardo Panattoni: "Black out of the image - Essay on photography and the anachronisms of the gaze" (Mondadori, 2013).
Memory, in fact, as Giorgio Agamben writes, is not possible without an image, without a "phantasma" that pronounces itself as an affection, a "pathos" of sensation and thought. The inner images are always charged with an energy destined to disturb the body, to make it vibrate as a hint of movement.
Exactly, the "pathos" that makes vibrate--by blurring--from within our body that remembers and sees. I believe that there are images that are beautiful precisely in their being blurred due to their being too focused on the internal pathos. The focus is not on the outside, like the classic images, but instead on feeling, on what is happening inside the people we are looking at.
They are the "phantasma" of their emotions. Each ghost has indefinite contours but affects us in a stronger way than a defined and real body. Precisely because we have to complete the action of focusing, try to define what is undefined in front of us, but full of feeling. Blurry images are the inner images of our feelings.
Again as Panattoni magnificently writes about the holy light of the bliss of St. Thomas which compares to the photographic images:
They are the "phantasma" of their emotions. Each ghost has indefinite contours but affects us in a stronger way than a defined and real body. Precisely because we have to complete the action of focusing, try to define what is undefined in front of us, but full of feeling. Blurry images are the inner images of our feelings.
Again as Panattoni magnificently writes about the holy light of the bliss of St. Thomas which compares to the photographic images:
This visuality of light, in the transparency of the image, allows us to emerge a feeling that is very close to what we can consider a hope. The irreparability of what has been shined in full light, it's being definitively past is reaffirmed without any possibility of remedy and yet the static suspension of that event is still visually in the world.
The light that brings with it hope, emotions that have passed but remain before us are enclosed in the images.
A son who suddenly embraces his mother and kisses her in an instant, making her explode in a laugh of joy, like a flame that suddenly ignites in an instant illuminating the whole scene and then remains silent; but now impressed, for a micro second forever in history: blurred, moved, indefinite, but full of the pathos of our emotions, and full of hope, of blissful light.
Like the photograph of Domon Ken, the Master of Japanese Realism, where Realism is not simply the faithful reproduction of reality, but also that of feelings, which very often are precisely "blurred" by an excess of focus, intended as pathos, what which is closest to our heart.
A son who suddenly embraces his mother and kisses her in an instant, making her explode in a laugh of joy, like a flame that suddenly ignites in an instant illuminating the whole scene and then remains silent; but now impressed, for a micro second forever in history: blurred, moved, indefinite, but full of the pathos of our emotions, and full of hope, of blissful light.
Like the photograph of Domon Ken, the Master of Japanese Realism, where Realism is not simply the faithful reproduction of reality, but also that of feelings, which very often are precisely "blurred" by an excess of focus, intended as pathos, what which is closest to our heart.
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| Ananda Nogor. DHAKA, 14 February 2020 (c) Stefano Romano |
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“Gemella non vedente”, dalla serie Hiroshima, 1957 (c) Domon Ken
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