The Intentional Blur

For a decade of my life, my hands smelled faintly of developer fluid and stop bath.

I moonlighted as a professional photographer for about ten years alongside my teaching career. The work kept me especially busy during the spring, summer, and fall. I spent hours closed off in my own darkroom, bathed in red light. Much of that time was spent chasing clarity. I would dial in the enlarger, hold my breath, and twist the focus ring to find that razor-sharp edge.

"The best camera is the one that's with you."

-Chase Jarvis

But clarity isn’t the only way to see.

I don’t have a darkroom anymore. In fact, I haven’t carried a bulky SLR in six years. My camera today is just a smooth, rectangular piece of glass in my pocket. My iPhone. But a funny thing happens when you spend years understanding how light and chemistry behave. You never really lose the darkroom mindset; you find new ways to apply it.

Now, when I need to push myself, when I need to create truly, I let go of the focus ring. I want the blur.

For the last several years, I’ve been practicing Intentional Camera Movement, or ICM. Using the Slow Shutter Cam app on my phone, I hold the digital shutter open and sweep the lens across downtown Kenosha architecture or the horizon line of Lake Michigan.

I created a 30-day photography course that is free and has fantastic explorations of all types of photography; one of them is ICM Photography.

It is a process that is both entirely freeing and deeply frustrating.

I don’t frequently create the most beautiful images this way. In fact, many of them are a mess. The resulting image is rarely a perfect replica of reality. It is a wash of color, a streak of shadow, a feeling. But when it works, when the motion and the light finally align to look more like a watercolor painting than a photograph, it lights me up.

It takes a strange kind of courage to embrace the blur.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot this month. For thirty-four years, the edges of my life were sharply defined. We didn’t have bells, but we were ruled by complicated schedules. We all had to constantly watch the clocks to maintain the rhythm of the building. Summer was always a beautiful, finite container of time, strictly measured by the calendar.

But this June is different. The clocks no longer dictate the day. The container is gone.

At fifty-seven, sitting in this new apartment with Erica, the schedule has dissolved. For the first time in over three decades, the edges of my days are wonderfully, terrifyingly undefined.

We aren’t taking a massive overseas trip this summer. We are staying closer to home, planning shorter micro-expeditions, and leaving space to just exist. I am pulling out paintbrushes. I am reading history and watching documentaries just for the sake of being curious. I am filling the sponge without worrying about what I’m supposed to wring it out for.

In a world obsessed with sharp focus and perfect resolution, there is a deep, quiet relief in letting things soften.

What if this next chapter isn’t supposed to be sharply defined? What if we don’t have to capture reality perfectly every single time?

Maybe, sometimes, we just need to leave the shutter open, move toward the light, and see what happens.