from Startles (an ongoing sequence)

from Startles

The curb says, do not park here. It says, storm drain below, says palm tree above, says graveyard, says take my picture. And I do: narrow band of weathered yellow paint, stains born of damage to the concrete, one splotch of red paint showing through. The curb says it might be art, though no one intended it for that. Workers meant to lay the paint down; weather and heavy machinery altered it.

Unintentional art, like a tree’s runnels of sap, chance colors capturing real moths and ants. My photograph gets selected for an “abstract only” exhibit. The print shop tells me it’s blurry, unfocused. My photographer friend says it’s unfocused. Months later, I return to the storm drain, sit on the road in front of it (workers and tourists driving behind me) and take the same photograph. Too much light.

Later, under cloud cover, I hurry back, several steps in front of the blue sky coming toward the mountains. I sit; I take; I take more. Downloaded, there is less light, but also less abstraction. As my friend John says, “hyper-focused, it looks like, well, a curb.” Reality, you see, is clear.

Back I go to the first, the beautifully muddled image, less curb than canvas. Guy at print shop says AI software sharpens it. I go with the artificial clarity, sharper than the first image, blurrier than the last. It’s the curb photo’s equanimity, the middle path between smudge and careful syntax. A good story, my second friend says.

AI writes: It seems you're interested in the blurry elements present in some of Dorothea Lange's photographs, particularly her famous "Migrant Mother". I’m addressed as if I’m real, and can be taught. There are reasons for the blurs, it seems. But the images are evocative! Do blurs make them more or less “real,” or does the sharp focus?

The curb doesn’t talk to us about suffering, nor about itself as the subject of our regard. The curb refuses introspection, which is one of its virtues. What it does to us is difficult to name. Abstraction is what runs, like paint, leaving bits of story like a red island poking through yellow. Napalm girl might also have been out of focus.

In Italian, no one “takes” photographs. That’s our vernacular, this taking of. Your image is now mine, though you keep what hides behind the blur. It’s a strange form of decolonizing, this being out of focus, Improvised Expressive Device. It hurts the certain eye, but bathes the uncertain one in dull light.