Photography is often defined by its ability to capture reality with unmatched accuracy, but a Norton Museum of Art exhibition challenges that notion with a selection of photos that explore the revelatory power of visual distortion.
Running until Aug. 24, “Blur / Obscure / Distort: Photography and Perception” features pieces from 24 artists who examine the meaning of perspective through their unorthodox approaches to photography.
“We think of photography as a reproduction of reality, but it really is an interpretation of reality, because all photography is based on one artist’s viewpoint,” Lauren Richman, the William and Sarah Ross Soter Curator of Photography at the Norton Museum Richman, told the Daily News.
Richman said the idea for the exhibition was sparked by her interest in artists who specialize in manipulating viewer perception, and how that approach challenges the traditional notion of photography.
“When photography emerged, it was thought of as more scientific, not artistic,” she said.
That changed with the pictorialism movement that began in the late 19th century, which saw photographers utilize a soft-focus effect to give their photography a hazy blur reminiscent of a pastel drawing, Richman noted.
Since then, artists have continued to challenge what photography is through an ever-growing arsenal of camera and photo-editing processes.
That arsenal includes motion blur, which Martin Kersels uses in “Whirling Melinda,” a blurred image of a man holding the legs of an unseen partner. The sunlit scene and its whimsical name convey a feeling of joyful nostalgia.
Other works distort an object’s original colors, like Richard Mosse’s “Girl from the North Country,” an image of the Democratic Republic of Congo landscape taken with military-grade infrared film. The film transforms the green and brown landscape into a mesmerizing display of pink foliage rising from an otherworldly teal and blue landscape.
But the film’s vibrant colors hide an ominous underpinning. The image was taken amid a decades-long civil conflict, with the otherworldly infrared film serving as an ominous reference to news media’s detachment from the bloodshed they report on, according to the artist’s description.
“It’s really interesting because it’s totally enrapturing, beautiful, weird and mysterious, but when you know the story, it’s kind of horrifying,” Richman told the Daily News.
The sole installation piece, Christian Boltanski’s “La Reliquaire,” emphasizes the exhibition’s “obscure” theme. The roughly five-foot-tall structure is composed of 36 small tin boxes and two open-faced large steel boxes. The large boxes appear empty up close, but after visitors take a few steps backwards, the images of two Jewish schoolchildren from 1939 are revealed, faintly obscured by the boxes’ metal meshes.
Richman also noted that each tin box contained a piece of fabric, a reference to the piece’s name, which translates to reliquary, and serve to emphasize the work’s examination of “death, memorialization and loss.”
In some works, light is used to obscure a subject to emphasize an image’s thematic elements, like Turkish artist Sarp Karem Yavuz’s work, “#1.” Shadows bathe the image, save for the waist of a man, which is illuminated in white and blue light styled in historic Ottoman-era patterns.
A queer artist critical of Turkey’s increasingly nationalistic and conservative political movements, Yavuz makes work that directly challenges them, Richman noted. The patterns depicted in the image were the result of Islamic historic taboo of depicting the human form, she said.
“So, he’s kind of pushing against that, challenging those idea through the use of similar imagery, but on a male,” she said.
The Norton Museum, 1450 S. Dixie Highway, West Palm Beach, is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday; 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday; and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.
For more information, call 561-832-5196 or visit norton.org.
Diego Diaz Lasa is a journalist at the Palm Beach Daily News, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at dlasa@pbdailynews.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Norton Museum exhibition explores photographers’ power to manipulate perception
Reporting by Diego Diaz Lasa, Palm Beach Daily News / Palm Beach Daily News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
