Against
Resolution

There is a habit of mind so deeply ingrained in photographic practice that it passes almost unnoticed: the assumption that a good image is a clear one. Clear subject, clear moment, clear emotion, clear meaning. The technical vocabulary of photography reinforces this assumption at every level: sharp focus, correct exposure, decisive moment, well-composed frame. The image is evaluated by how successfully it has resolved the scene it depicts — how completely it has extracted its subject from the surrounding complexity of the world and presented it, legibly, for the viewer’s comprehension.

This is not wrong, exactly. Clarity is a genuine value, and there are kinds of photography — documentary, journalistic, scientific — in which it is the primary virtue. But it is a limited value. And the limitation becomes visible the moment you ask what kind of experience a perfectly clear image can produce. The answer is: comprehension. The viewer understands what the image shows, identifies its subject, registers its emotional register, and moves on. The image has done its job, which was to communicate something efficiently. It has been used, and it is over.

The images that stay — the ones that return to mind unbidden, that change across multiple encounters, that seem to know something they have not finished telling you — are almost never images of pure clarity. They are images that have, at their centre or at their edges or woven through their structure, something that does not resolve. Something withheld. Something that the eye returns to because it has not yet been satisfied. This chapter is an argument for that something. For the image that does not explain itself. For ambiguity not as a failure of communication but as its highest form.

Tarkovsky, in Sculpting in Time, writes about the obligation of the artist to refuse the obvious. Not to withhold meaning perversely, not to be obscure for the sake of difficulty, but to understand that the most important things — the qualities of experience that matter most, that move most deeply, that change the person who receives them — are precisely the things that resist direct statement. They can be approached, circled, gestured toward. They cannot be delivered. The image that attempts to deliver them directly produces not the experience but its simulacrum: the appearance of feeling without the feeling itself.

This is a claim about the nature of aesthetic experience, and it is worth taking seriously. When we are most moved by an image — when something in it produces not just recognition or approval but a genuine alteration of the way we are feeling, a shift in the quality of our attention, a sense of having encountered something that matters — it is almost never because the image has told us clearly what to feel. It is because the image has created conditions in which a feeling becomes available to us, without prescribing what that feeling must be. The image opens a space. We enter it. What happens in that space is ours.

This is the argument against resolution. A resolved image has closed its space. It has made its statement, answered its own question, tied its own ends. There is nothing left for the viewer to do except receive the communication that has been sent. The experience is passive — and passive experience, however pleasurable, does not change anything. It confirms what the viewer already knows or feels. It does not ask for more.

The unresolved image leaves something open. Not carelessly, not through inattention or technical failure, but deliberately: because the maker has understood that the open space is where the viewer lives, and that closing it would be an act of exclusion. The ambiguity is not an accident. It is an invitation — the same invitation that Raymond Moore was describing when he spoke of inexhaustible images, images that gave something different on each encounter because they had been made with more patience and more strangeness than any single viewing could exhaust.

Ambiguity in a visual image can operate at several levels simultaneously, and distinguishing between them is important for understanding what makes the best ambiguous images so much more than merely unclear.

The first level is referential ambiguity: the image does not make clear what it depicts. The subject is not identifiable, or is identifiable only partially, or admits of multiple equally plausible identifications. This is the crudest form of ambiguity and the least interesting. An out-of-focus photograph of an unidentifiable object is referentially ambiguous, but the ambiguity produces nothing in the viewer except the desire for a sharper version. The question it raises — what is this? — is a question of identification, and its answer would immediately resolve the image and end the experience.

The second level is narrative ambiguity: the image depicts something clearly enough to be identified, but the relationship between its elements — the connection between the figures, the nature of the event, what has happened or is about to happen — remains genuinely open. This is more interesting. The viewer knows what they are looking at but not what it means, and that gap between recognition and understanding keeps the eye in motion, the mind active, the image alive across multiple encounters.

The third level, and the most powerful, is ontological ambiguity: the image raises a question not about what is depicted or what it means, but about the nature of the world it shows. Whether it is a world in which ordinary rules apply. Whether the space the image constructs is stable or dreamlike. Whether what we are seeing is real, remembered, imagined, or something that resists all three categories. This is the ambiguity of the uncanny — the sense that the image knows something about the world that the world has not yet told us, that its strangeness is not a failure of representation but a more accurate representation of something that clear images miss.

The photographic instinct for clarity has a specific historical origin: the decisive moment, as theorized by Cartier-Bresson and absorbed into the mainstream of photographic practice. The decisive moment is the instant at which the visual elements of a scene achieve their maximum formal coherence — at which the relationships between figures, light, space, and movement are most precisely organized and most completely legible. The photograph that captures this moment is a resolved image almost by definition: it has found the instant of maximum clarity and preserved it.

This is a genuine achievement, and Cartier-Bresson’s best images demonstrate it with extraordinary consistency. But it is one kind of photographic intelligence among several, and it is not self-evidently the most profound kind. The decisive moment is a moment of peak legibility — of maximum organization — and legibility, as we have been arguing, is not the same as meaning. The most organized instant is not necessarily the most resonant one. Sometimes the image that matters most is made in the moment before the scene organizes itself, or after it has dissolved again into flux, or in a direction away from the obvious subject — in a condition of partial resolution that captures something the decisive moment, in its clarity, misses.

What it misses is the texture of how experience actually feels: not organized, not decisive, not clear. The moment before you understand what you are seeing. The feeling of a presence that has not yet revealed its nature. The sense of a space that is familiar and strange simultaneously, that you recognize and cannot name. These are the experiences that the best ambiguous images can produce, and they are not available to the image that has resolved everything in advance.

The chapters that follow examine three different forms of ambiguity across three different bodies of work. The Norfolk Broads photographs of Peter Henry Emerson — and through them, the tradition of landscape photography that Raymond Moore extended a century later — demonstrate ambiguity as spatial reverie: the world rendered in a tonal register so compressed that depth becomes uncertain and the boundary between the observed and the dreamed grows thin. The paintings of Henri Rousseau demonstrate ambiguity as the strangeness of a world in which perspective has been suspended and the logic of near and far, of scale and space, follows rules that are internally consistent but alien to ordinary visual experience. And in the final chapter of this part, we return to Vermeer — to the letter that is never read, the window that is never explained, the figure that remains sealed within its own interiority — to understand what it means for an image to trust its viewer enough to leave the deepest question permanently open.

All three forms of ambiguity share the quality that distinguishes the open image from the merely unclear one: they are the product of sustained, careful, deliberate attention. The ambiguity does not arise from inattention to the subject or carelessness with the form. It arises from an understanding — achieved through long looking, long thinking, long making — that the subject contains more than any resolved image can hold, and that the honest response to that excess is not to simplify it but to find a form capacious enough to contain it.

That form is the open image. And learning to make it, and to receive it, is the subject of the next three chapters.