'Blur/Obscure/Distort' Coming to Norton Museum

Christopher Bucklow (Norton Museum)

(Press Release) West Palm Beach, Florida (March 24, 2025) — For most photographers, the medium is all about sharpness and clarity of image.

But imagine if there were another story to be told through the disruption of that clarity in images.

That is the premise of the exhibition Blur / Obscure / Distort: Photography and Perception, open April 5-August 24, 2025, at the Norton Museum of Art.

Blur / Obscure / Distort brings together photographs from the Norton’s Collection that disrupt the viewer’s sense of time, space, place, and scale.

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“The artists in this exhibition urge greater awareness about the constructed nature of perception and, in turn, a photograph’s vulnerability to manipulation even when it appears to show what is ‘real,’” notes Lauren Richman, the Norton’s William and Sarah Ross Soter Senior Curator of Photography.

Featured artists in Blur / Obscure / Distort include such 20th and 21st century talents as Francesca Woodman, André Kertész, Jeff Brouws, Uta Barth, Rami Maymon, Penelope Umbrico, Sandra Kantanen, Richard Mosse, and Benn Mitchell.

Often considered errors, photographic distortion and disorientation have been important creative and aesthetic strategies adopted by artists throughout the nearly two centuries of the medium’s history.

Since the birth of photography, debates about blur and sharpness have been at the center of the conversation.

For the 19th century Pictorialists, blur — or softness — was an appealing and essential artistic quality they believed could elevate the mechanical medium to align more readily with painting.

In opposition, avant-garde artists associated with the “New Vision” of the post-World War I period rejected blur and celebrated photographs that achieved greater sharpness and precision than the human eye. Blur also became associated with motion and speed, two elements that could further persuade viewers of the medium’s realism and perceived objectivity.

Certain details are blurred, obscured, or distorted to create tension, perhaps even undermining our perception of reality.

“Photography is inextricably linked to our perception of reality — it allows us to see, shape, and preserve moments in time,” Richman said. “Each picture is the product of a series of decisions made by the artist to tell a story. It's up to viewers to interpret the tale.”
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