Oro Editions All a Blur: Photographs from the Infinity Series

Bill Armstrong has a grid of nine photographs that is a permanent installation at the foot of the stairs of the Sistine chapel in the Vatican Museum. Hundreds of people see it every day All a Blur is the first time that the complete Infinity series has been seen together. it is a remarkable book Deborah Martin Kao, curator of photography at the Fogg Museum called the Infinity series a major body of work 20 years ago. It has grown many times over since then All a Blur is the first in-depth monograph by one of the foremost practitioners of photographic abstraction, Bill Armstrong The luminous work of Bill Armstrong has long stretched the boundaries and expectations of contemporary photography. In his explorations and subversion of the ostensible objectivity and precision that have distinguished photography among the visual arts, Armstrong foregrounds the medium's qualities that photographers had been attempting to exploit since the beginning of the twentieth century: colour and focus. All a Blur showcases Mr. Armstrong's Infinity series, an ongoing project he has been working on for over 25 years. The book presents 21 different portfolios, all made by using his unique process of photographing a collage of found or appropriated images extremely out of focus or distorted by handheld time exposures. The variety of subjects and results he achieves with this process is so broad it has been said that he has developed a medium of his own invention that lies at the intersection of photography, painting and collage. With mysterious and poetic images that reflect on history, philosophy, identity and spirituality, Armstrong conjures a unique alternate reality that might exist in dreams, in memory, or, perhaps, in a parallel universe. At the same time, the subject of the work is colour. By taking away focus and the usual expectations of photography, Armstrong is able to investigate the qualities and effects of pure colour in a profound way, freed from the limits of representation.