From Lyle Rexer’s piece in the Brooklyn Rail:
To appreciate what Bill Armstrong has done in this luminous mini-retrospective, we need to geek out a bit on the origins of photographic blur. Recall Louis Daguerre’s picture from 1838, famous in the history of photography, that shows a man on a Paris street having his shoes shined. He’s there in the distance, a bit vague, but the shoeshine boy is barely a ghost, and the streets are empty—no people, carriages, horses, or busy activity. That’s because at the dawn of the medium, the emulsion on a photographic plate required long exposure to register an image. So only what didn’t move—primarily buildings and trees in this case—made an appearance. Everything else was likely to be fuzzy around the edges at best.
Browse the exhibition “Bill Armstrong | All a Blur” at CLAMP
Browse all work by Bill Armstrong at CLAMP