In the age of digital photography, it’s easy to achieve sharp and clear captures. However, this has also led to the notion that sharpness is overrated. Today’s photography inspiration may be a point of discussion (or debate, even), but let’s ask anyway, can blurry photos be tasteful?

In the video above, Imitative Photography introduces us to the work of Olga Karlovac, who only shoots black and white blurry photos using point-and-shoot cameras. She self-published her first book Before Winter in 2017, followed by The Disarray in 2019, then Escape in 2021, along with a number of exhibits.

Black and white, she said, gives more strength and essence to her photos. Add to this the otherworldly quality that blur adds to an image and you have a visual style that feels like a memory. This, the video notes, parallels how memories tend to blur with time — you may forget the fine details but still remember the broad strokes.

This creative use of blur relies a lot on the power of emotive visuals. Admittedly, that’s not always easy to pull off, nor does it work with all photography projects. But in case you still want to try recreating this style, the video above includes some tips to help you get the look and feel.

What do you think of Olga Karlovac’s emotive approach to black and white photography? Do you find it an effective or clever way to use blur? Share your insight with us in the comments below, or in our group discussion if you’re already part of the Photofocus Community!

When Kodak opened its doors in 1888, photography was a cumbersome chemical process best left to professionals, a reason George Eastman’s slogan caught on: “You press the Button, We do the Rest.” Now that we’ve switched out cameras for phones and outsourced “the Rest”—managing our stories, storing our memories—to Meta and Apple, we might forget to think about photography at all. We might forget to think not just about what it is, but also what it can do, especially since photography is mostly mischaracterized as a means merely to document, and underestimated for its ability to explore what oftentimes cannot be easily seen. “Pictures are luckier, they are looser than words,” writes Rebecca Bengal in her just-published collection of essays on photography, Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists. “Words have to fight harder to arrange themselves, to express that which in a photograph might be the mingling of order and accident, a strange convergence, a kind of grace.”

In this collection of thoughtful and elegant essays, Bengal, a former editor at Vogue (where some of these essays first appeared), writes about pictures and picture-makers, but also about the history of the medium over the course of the last half a century. We meet well-known and not-known-enough photographers, as introduced by a writer whose experience in the world of editorial photography is rooted in time spent at the legendary and now-defunct magazine DoubleTake. Published from 1995 to 2004, with fiction, essays, poetry, and reviews, the magazine was “a home where image and word have equal weight,” according to its founders, the doctor, psychiatrist, and author Robert Coles and photographer Alex Harris. Their inspiration was the famed partnership of James Agee and Walker Evans, as well as the collaboration of writers and photographers of the Works Progress Administration. It was a place where what was sometimes described as social realism was worked out with both typewriters and lenses, and Bengal describes her tenure there as (not unlike her book) “a brief but compelling meditation and record of the possibilities and problems and relationships that exist between words and pictures.”

Alec Soth, Near Williston, North Dakota, 2012; from Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists by Rebecca Bengal (Aperture, 2023).

Photo: Courtesy the artist

A 14-year-old boy captured these breathtaking images of a wild elephant emerging and wandering on the road of Khao Yai National Park in Nakhon Nayok Province.

Images published on the page “The Sound of a Sobbing Forest” (เสียงป่าสะอึ้น) were taken by Krishna Rojanaburanont, 14, son of Mr. Asampinpong Rojanaburanont, the headman of Ban Pong Pratun, Pak Chong Sub-district, Pak Chong District, Nakhon Ratchasima Province, and page members who travelled up with him to photograph nature on Khao Yai on June 5.

The elephant, which was about 15-18 years old, without tusks, and was of unknown gender, strolled out of the forest on the way out, leading automobiles to want to drive away but were unable to do so due to the large number of cars following after. The wild elephant then proceeded down into the forest.

Mr. Chaiya Huaihongthong, the head of Khao Yai National Park, stated that wild elephants occasionally come out to walk on the road that leads to the Prachinburi side. Mr. Sittiporn Product, an officer who is experienced with wild elephants, is usually in charge of looking after and assisting visitors and others who utilise this route.

“Since I took the position of head of the Khao Yai National Park for almost 2 years, I have never seen wild elephants attack anyone. Because wild elephants in Khao Yai are good-natured. Just tourists, don’t go to stir up the elephants. Stay 50 meters away from elephants. Don’t turn off the engine. Don’t blow the horn. Don’t make noise. Wild elephants won’t do anything harm,” said Chaiya.