Focus, focus, focus!
Spark or ember?
Moving towards or moving away?
Or - and, bear with me - to ask another way: in between focus?
These questions have been on my mind after a coincidence of timing: the start of the new year and stumbling upon the derivation of the word focus. Stuck in bed with a grisly cold, kind of sort of reading, but not really taking in any words, I snapped to, well, focus, for a minute when the author off-handedly mentioned that focus was the Latin word for hearth. This surprised me. For a word most associated with the realms of the visual or mental, it seemed curious that its source was so deep in the domestic.
But it makes sense, though.
The hearth is the center of the home. The hearth is the place around which sustenance, warmth, and stories - call it survival - coalesce. The hearth is the place attention must return; one eye fixed on the life of the fire upon which so much depends. This is as true for cities as it is for homes. In the heart of the ancient Roman Forum, stood the Temple of Vesta - a hearth in the center of the city - in which blazed the sacred perpetual flame, tended by the elite and powerful Vestal Virgins. This flame protected Rome, and, by extension, its empire, (And, in case your job has you stressed out, remember this: the unlucky Vestal Virgin who let the flame die was buried alive, so, no pressure there . . . )
All belief and cultural systems contain some sort of ritual or blessed fire. While often a metaphor, this fire could just as likely be an actual incarnation of the Divine or transcendent, too: the Burning Bush, the Holy Spirit descending as tongues of flame, the Olympic torch, the Eternal Flame enkindled at various battlefields and military cemeteries, or - my personal favorite - the Atash Bahram, the Zoroastrian fire of victory, thought to be roaring since 721 and transported from Yemen to India in 1976 in a Boeing 707 specially designed to carry live fire.
In the same way a hearth holds a fire then, so focus holds what is essential. Elemental. I like this idea. I like its expansiveness. I like that it includes time and change as vital elements of focus. Just as a fire is ever-changing, ever-moving so, too, is focus. Perhaps this seems backwards. After all, focus, we think, is static, still. Focus is crystalline, clear, and knife-edged. That kind of needle-prick clarity is the ideal. (Some might also call that ideal a fetish.)
But the more time I spend behind a camera, the more I see and experience directly how elusive focus is. (It’s the same with writing; I have spent more time staring into space drafting this newsletter . . . ) Even with the astoundingly sophisticated machinery of a digital camera, and the many focus points it offers, there are times when I cannot locate focus to save my life. It simply won’t take hold.
It resists capture. And it resists stubbornly. (You’d be surprised just how stubborn an inanimate tool can be!)
When I remember not to fight this, sometimes - not always - something beautiful emerges, however blurred. Softer edges are no less true because they are more difficult to grasp. I think this is why I enjoy taking deliberately out of focus pictures so much. (Although maybe it’s more accurate to describe them as in between focus.) My teacher, Carol, once suggested I take the messiest pictures I could, hoping I might push past the rigidity and tightness that often crept into my work; perhaps an image could simply breathe for a change. This could have gone many different ways. And it did for a bit. But the useful direction turned out to be the one in which, as a friend remarked looking at the resulting images: “I think you need to get your eyes examined.”
Here’s the thing: it’s hard to take a “good” in between focus picture. Adjusting the lens, one infinitesimal turn in the wrong direction either way and the image collapses into a blob: Turn. Turn. Pudding. When shooting in this way, I try to emulate the work of Bill Jacobson which I love. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Jacobson made a series of profound black and white images - his first images after a period of not shooting for seven years! - in which the subjects were utterly out of focus yet unmistakably present.
The men in these images might have been dreams or aliens so hard were they to see properly; they might have been vanishing before your eyes, or just starting to develop. However indistinct these figures were, and whether you were in the presence of absence or birth, or both, an elemental trace remained. Difficult to grasp? Yes. But also irreducible. In the same way a hearth holds a fire, so Jacobson’s sense of focus held what was essential.
I can’t say if I come close to this in my own work or not. But that’s what I seek in what looks out of focus: that tension, that ambiguity. Think of it like this. A spark in the hearth, and the fire comes near. A spark, a moment approaches. An ember in the hearth, and the fire goes away. An ember, a moment recedes.
Then there is the moment in between.
And all the other moments in between. The moments the fire burns, and you can’t quite distinguish what’s spark and what’s ember, even as something still gives off heat and light.
Travelers once believed that it took time for your soul to catch up with your body while traveling. (It’s as good an explanation for jet lag as any.) Your soul didn’t arrive from the place you left behind all at once. That’s why travelers feel - not unpleasantly - dislocated. You could say that the fire hadn’t yet fully formed in its proper hearth. A new year feels that way to me. Certainly this particular new year feels that way to me. These thoughts rather feel that way. So much remains in between focus.
Spark or ember?
Moving towards or moving away?
Perhaps. Which is to simply say: alight.
