Based off of my new experience and newfound interest in using the lens baby to blur photos, I researched artists Mona Kuhn and Uta Barth to see how they used the blurred feature as well. When doing this I also ran into another artist, Laurent Baillet, who uses blur in his photographs as well. Each of these artists utilize the effect of blur differently through their work. To start, Mona Kuhn is known for her photographs of the intimate life of natural nudes, as well as the occasional landscape. She uses blur in her photos to bring certain aspects of the content into focus as well as make certain aspects hard to see although easily recognizable. I found it interesting how she would sometimes have one figure, or a few placed into a scene while only generally having one figure of the group in focus, or focus in on a feature of a single figure. She would also use the effects of window reflections to create a hidden blur although everything was in focus. Lastly, she would even sometimes use objects to focus on while having blurry figures in the background.
Utah Barth uses the blur effect intensely by focusing the camera on an empty foreground. These colorful images experimented with the descriptive clarity of photography and the haze of memory. I found that with using the blur technique in this manner it somewhat creates a bokeh effect with the very generalized figures and objects used in the content. She generally would take pictures of outside locations, sometimes recognizable and other times it becomes hard to tell what kind of atmosphere it is depending on how much information she leaves us in her photos.
Lastly I found Laurent Baillet who has done work similar to the fortune concept I just completed. Baillet doesn’t use a lens baby to create his effects, but instead creates a sense of movement in the environment by creating photos with a very clear, still background that feature many blurred people in crowded public areas moving. The process he uses is not created by the usual blur, but something that appears to be created by using multiple exposures and possibly manipulating them in photoshop by combining the still background with the moving crowd of people. His photographs reflect the modernized commercial world around us, as well as mass culture and it’s effect on us being the consumers as if we are almost fading away or being erased by our fascination with the commercial world and letting it consume us as a society. Overall I found all of these artists extremely eye-opening and found that i will continue to experiment and play with the blurred effect.
Ambience of Existence 
I am anxious to see how this influences your future work!
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