'The World Strikes the Body': Blur and Violence

Research paper presented at one-day international conference in the Department of Art History, University of Edinburgh.
This paper explores the aesthetics of blur in photography, specifically its function of simultaneously denoting and obscuring violence. In photojournalism and documentary photography, blur often signals an ‘authentic’ encounter with physical violence; a signification that is also transferrable to other genres of photography. Physical violence is not just movement, but movement that is somehow out of control – the camera registers the locus of violence as blur; a moment of transgression in which the camera’s drive to render the world orderly and composed is most challenged. The paper uses a range of examples through which to consider photographic blur as both an indexical and symbolic marker of violence, focusing in particular on documentary photography on the subject of domestic abuse. The title of the paper is a quote from Terry Eagleton’s definition of aesthetics.