Gabriela Ponce Curlango, camogli_1 and camogli_2 from the ongoing series out of focus, film photography, 2023

When my grandfather was a kid, one of his friends let him try on their glasses. Up until that point, his understanding of what the world looked like was one that lacked detail, lights blooming, and shapes without sure edges. For a child born in the 90’s, I came from a time period where glasses were common and an obvious solution for blurry vision. But this story made me wonder what it was like for my grandfather to live for so many years needing to find workarounds for his daily experience, not realizing that a blurry world isn’t the norm and that a solution was available for correcting it.

My project contains samples from an ongoing photographic series that explores what the world looks like out of focus. The photos were each taken on my phone through a magnifying glass and then slightly edited to blur the details a bit further. Like the Impressionists who were greatly influenced by the optical developments around vision, glasses, and cameras at the time, my work explores light, shape, and color through a different lens (pun intended). By reducing the sharpness and detail in each image, I challenge viewers to step outside the idealized images that have become the norm through technological advancements, photo editing software, and social expectations of what entails a “good photo.” My hope is that these images will invite viewers to slow down to figure out what they’re looking at and appreciate both our ability as humans to recognize objects with such little information and the optical advancements of our time.

A few years ago, my niece and her father took apart a laptop screen revealing several layers of plastics that make our screens functional. One of these layers distorts, multiplies, and reflects the light passing through it, creating a deliciously softening lens from which to explore the world around me.

To take these photos I contort the individual layer of the laptop screen plastic until I find a composition that I like and then shoot the photo.