Blurred Lines: A Snapchat Story
I’ll admit mom, it was a phase.
It was my style, my signature, my motif. In an age of smartphone manufacturers were bragging about the amazing quality of their cameras, I made their advances moot. The blur, was my friend.
Sometimes, you make a bad decision. I made a bad decision; One that leaves you with nowhere to turn. I felt tracked, wanted, scared. It was fear. Was I actually in danger? I don’t think so. However emotionally it was terrifying. Also around that time, I was a newbie on SV Snapchat (well technically not but that’s another, more technical story). I made it a point to myself to keep a snapchat story.
For the uninitiated, in addition to self destructing picture messages, Snapchat allows users to post pictures to to their “story” which can be viewed by friends for a 24 hour period. Afterwards, keeping with the Snapchat theme, the pictures disappear.
Not wanting to abandon my point to myself, (that would be letting them win), yet not wanting to give out my location in near real time, I found a compromise. I would take grossly blurry photos for my story. It was perfect.
Eventually, I didn’t feel scared anymore. The time and reasoning became irrelevant. However I carried on. This visual motif, forged out of fear, became part of me. I embraced it, and made it my own.. I became known for my signature blur or my “snapsthetic” as I referred to it as. My Artsy peer described it:
“an interesting artistic pursuit because it’s non-objective and focuses more on ambiguous values and forms that can been seen in a bunch of different ways”
The importance of color
Normally constraints are inherent in the social media platforms we use. In this case however, it was something I did to myself. Like all constraints, it forced me to get creative with what I had. I gained a real respect for color. With the distraction of hard line blurred out, the feature that really shows is color. Even though it appears to be a bold imprecise brush stroke, when isolated it reveals its subtleties, like how intense colors bleed out or “bloom” well beyond their point of origin.
If you were expecting a profound revelation, sorry to disappoint. I didn’t have one. It was an actual, honest to all, phase. But what I do have are lots of pictures, by which to remember this phase.
