The Impossible Photograph: Blur and Domestic Violence

Abstract

In photojournalism and documentary photography, blur usually serves to signal an “authentic” encounter of one kind or another. In cases of physical violence, blur can indicate authenticity in a uniquely powerful way, constituting a disruption (or violation) of the aesthetic order of the photograph, just as violence itself disrupts the order of everyday lived experience. Physical violence is not just movement, but movement that is somehow out of control. The moving thing (such as a fist) becomes an abstraction that bursts its borders and confronts us with still photography’s limited capacity to render moving things still. This article uses one particular photograph from Donna Ferrato’s 1991 work, Living with the Enemy, to consider photographic blur as both an indexical and symbolic marker of violence, and to argue that domestic violence remains, despite Ferrato’s seminal work on the subject, essentially un-photographable.