LIFE IS A BLUR
"Photos like this make us feel something. I know it happens to me, anyway — the almost immediate sense of nostalgia when I see a photo that appears in motion, blurred, and indistinct. What makes these images beautiful? I’ve heard people say it’s because they symbolize our blurry memories: the blur of motherhood, the ineffability of life. I think it’s that, and more. It rejects form and in doing so, it becomes more than one form. It’s a photo and a painting and a poem. And it takes at least a photo and a painting and a poem to hold the complexity of the human experience. The only adequate container of truth synthesizes several forms at once."
"The blurred lines of an image help illustrate the questions that we all contain. What are we if we aren’t hard lines? How can these bodies hold the whole beautiful and ugly truth of what it means to be not just a family but a human being? A blurry photo communicates feeling in a language that perfection never will."
"There’s a happiness right here, right now — you just have to say yes to imperfection to let the joy in. And what better way to communicate the illusion of the finish line than with a mirage of truth, an in-between photo?"
Memories behind stained glass windows
Beckoned like some naked amnesiac
Who struggles to reach home.
from KIDDIE RIDES © 2010 Marjorie J. Levine
