ABSTRACT
Photographic images are often thought about as suspensions of transience. They can seem to petrify the onrush of time by isolating specific moments from what was previous and what came next. But photographs also gather up and move through times, in ways that can disrupt notions of temporal steadiness and neat divisibility. This chapter considers photographic blurs as sites of evasion and temporal disruption. It focuses on a particular site of non-focus found in Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s View of the Boulevard du Temple (1838 or 1839), while also aiming to zoom out on some broader questions pertaining to the temporalities of images and the ways in which we read them. It concludes with some remarks on the implications that an attunement to blurring could have for temporally-sensitive modes of art historical inquiry
