Blur in Photography: Perception, Memory, and the Act of Seeing

Santa Fe Workshops presents an online symposium devoted to blur as an intentional and expressive photographic language. Often dismissed as a technical flaw, blur has long been used by artists to move beyond description, inviting emotion, memory, intuition, and subjective experience into the photographic frame.

Moderated by photographer and educator Susan Burnstine, this new online event brings together three internationally recognized artists: Valda Bailey, Bill Armstrong, and Céline Bodin whose work engages blur in distinct and deeply personal ways. Across their practices, blur becomes a tool for questioning perception, challenging conventions of sharpness, and expanding what a photograph can communicate.

The symposium opens with brief remarks from Susan, who situates blur within a broader photographic history and introduces it as a conceptual and process-driven strategy. Working with handmade cameras and lenses, she produces effects entirely in-camera, creating images that evoke a distinctive, ethereal dream world. Building on this practice, she then leads a series of one-on-one conversations with each guest artist, creating space for focused, intimate dialogue around creative process, intention, and discovery.

Valda Bailey speaks about blur as an intuitive, physical process rooted in movement, gesture, and layering. Working between photography and painting, she reflects on how color, rhythm, and trace translate landscape into felt experience, emphasizing atmosphere over documentation.

Bill Armstrong reflects on his long-standing engagement with defocused imagery and abstraction, exploring how blur shapes perception and experience rather than simply describing a scene. Drawing from decades of practice, he considers how light, color, and ambiguity allow images to exist beyond fixed narrative.

Céline Bodin shares her approach to blur as a tool for reenactment and projection, engaging themes of femininity, identity, and distant memory. Referencing painting, art history, and mental imagery, she reflects on how softness, fragmentation, and sensory experience question representation, beauty, and the cultural construction of womanhood.

Following these individual conversations, Susan brings all three artists together for a group discussion that places their approaches into dialogue, highlighting points of convergence and divergence across practices. The symposium concludes with a live audience Q&A, inviting participants to engage directly with the artists and extend the conversation.

Whether you are newly curious about blur in photography or already immersed in experimental or abstract practice, this symposium invites you to slow down, see differently, and consider blur not as a loss of clarity, but as a space of expansive possibility.

Even if you can’t make the live event, a recording of it will be available for all those registered.