OOF

Photography is generally regarded as a medium of record, with an "indexical" relationship to visual reality. I was there; I saw this; I recorded it; this is what it really looked like. To most people, I'm sure, this is the whole point of any photograph: it's all about the subject matter, and a "good" photograph is one that shows the subject – whether it be a child's birthday party or the aftermath of a bombing – with clarity and the sort of visual tact and grammar usually referred to as "composition". This is why the name of the reportage photographer usually gets relegated to a tiny by-line, or is subsumed into the name of some photo-agency: photographers as agents of record are regarded as mere facilitators of the direction and angle of the many thousands of convenient little windows we have opening onto the world at large.

After all, who knows or cares about the name of the camera operators on the evening news, until, say, one of them becomes the news by getting injured or killed in the line of duty? It's as if we think there is a direct, multi-stranded, unauthored audio-visual pipeline from reality to our eyes and ears, and anything which distracts from, interferes with, or questions the veracity of the flow of information is necessarily bad, in the same way that a scratch on a vinyl record, radio interference, or a corrupted file are bad: when the medium foregrounds its own materiality at the expense of the message it's not doing its job properly.

However, photography as an art medium is different, in the same way that sound recording as an art medium is different. Obviously, there are many ways in which "pure" visual or sonic data can be used or manipulated to artistic ends, ranging from the subtle enhancements that create the illusion of a hyper-perfect reality to downright distortions and sampling. This has always been the case, but the toolboxes made available by digitisation have thrown open whole new worlds of possibility. Nonetheless, one constant among the art-minded has been a fascination with the intrinsic properties of any particular medium, best defined by its characteristic limitations, and these are often best revealed in turn by conditions of "error". This is not unconnected with certain strands of contemporary thought [1], but should not be mistaken for philosophy by other means. Artists just like playing with stuff, and finding out what unexpected things will happen once you've thrown away the instruction booklet.

An aspect of the photographic medium that has always fascinated me is the "lensiness" of photographs, always a factor in even the most straightforward photographs, of course, but revealed most obviously in "bad" or failed photographs, whether as flare, distortion, or – in the "error" that has piqued my interest recently – a drastic failure to achieve sharp focus. An out-of-focus photograph is, for purposes of record, a failed photograph. But it can also be a highly expressive image, one where the medium itself has conspired with the photographer's incompetence to subvert the original intention and to create a new, unintended, collaborative message.

This has nothing to do with the deranged fixation of gearheads on creating background blur or "bokeh", although this, too, is a property of imaging with lenses. As a general rule, I prefer my photographs to be sharp from back to front, and wish the camera developers would forget about functions like "smile detection" and instead install a simple "hyperfocal" setting [2]. I also find the use of "intentional camera movement" by many wannabe artist-photographers  – invariably referred to solemnly as ICM – annoying; I think it's the defensive, preemptive use of the word "intentional" that annoys me. An interest in unintentional FUF ("fucked-up focus") is, of course, an entirely worthy and serious matter.

Recently, I've been trawling through my backfiles, looking for examples of such expressive, out-of-focus (OOF?) photography. It turns out there are quite a few, and my lazy reliance on autofocus is clearly the main cause. The autofocus algorithm of a digital camera is easily fooled by distractions like an intermediary translucent surface, a distant object with sharp edges, or a bright light at the periphery of the frame, and generally cannot find anything to latch onto in low light conditions, but the idiot photographer will probably ignore its beeps of exasperation and go and press the button anyway. Result: OOF. It also seems a lot of my most agreeably blurry images have happened when photographing in museums and galleries, or in the street at night, where all of these factors combine: a dimly-lit vitrine, a glazed picture, or a dark street punctuated by artificial light-sources are calculated to make the autofocus algorithm throw up its hands in despair. I could always have made the effort to focus manually as in the old days, I suppose, but where's the fun in that?

Many of these images are negligible, but the best of them have the same sort of chance-endowed charm as some "end of roll" photographs in the days of film, when you had to start a new roll or finish an old one by winding on and exposing a few frames, randomly pointing the camera, often at the ground, often while in motion. The resulting exposures got processed along with everything else, and at either end of a contact sheet there would generally be the photographic equivalent of "noise". But occasionally there would instead be the sort of aleatory jewel that stopped you in your tracks and made you wonder: how the hell did I do that?

1. Somewhere in an ancient notebook I have copied a quote from – I think – Heidegger that says, in effect, that the nature of the modern world is most tellingly revealed by machines that are out of order. Much of "French" theory is motivated by an obsession with the limits of language itself, and how these are revealed and concealed.

2. A basic optical property of any lens is that for any given combination of focal length and aperture there is a unique focussing distance – the hyperfocal distance – at which everything from half that distance to infinity will be in acceptably sharp focus.