Blur / Obscure / Distort: Photography and Perception
Blur / Obscure / Distort: Photography and Perception brings together photographs that are linked by the common objective of disrupting the viewer’s sense of time, space, place, or scale. Sometimes considered errors, photographic blur, distortion, and obfuscation have also been important creative and aesthetic strategies adopted by artists since the medium’s 19th-century inception. Highlighting photographs from the Norton’s Collection and a selection of special loans, this exhibition points to the constructed nature of perception and, in turn, photography’s vulnerability to manipulation even when it appears to show what is “real.”
Martin Kersels (American, born 1960), Whirling Melinda, 1999
Uta Barth (German, born 1958), Ground #77, 1997
Sandra Kantanen (Finnish, born 1974), Untitled (Distortion 8), 2016
Jeff Brouws (American, born 1955), Interstate 40, Blurred car, New Mexico, 1992
Christoper Bucklow (English, born 1957), Tetrarch, 2008
Organized by the Norton Museum of Art.
Support for this exhibition was provided by the William and Sarah Ross Soter Photography Fund.