Blur by Sandra Brewster

Sandra Brewster’s Blur series captures figures in motion—obscured, layered, unresolved. In this compelling meditation, Pamela Edmonds explores how these images resist clarity, offering a space where Black life can breathe, shift, and remain undefined. Rather than pin her subjects down, Brewster allows them to linger in the blur, honoring the complexities of identity, migration, and memory. Her work insists that existence does not require explanation.

Using long exposures and physically demanding gel transfers, Brewster’s process is both aesthetic and conceptual. The images bear scratches, tears, and smudges—remnants of touch that echo the violence and resilience of diaspora. These marks are not flaws; they are the texture of remembering. Edmonds highlights how these visual gestures refuse the polished perfection of digital photography, returning us to something tactile and real.

The essay draws on the thinking of Édouard Glissant and Tina Campt, aligning Brewster’s work with a broader Black radical aesthetic that values opacity over legibility. Rather than invite the viewer to consume or decode, the images ask us to pause, to attune ourselves to what can’t be fully known. They are portraits of presence, not transparency—figures that emerge not to be claimed, but simply to be.

Ultimately, What Cannot Be Held frames Brewster’s series as a space for fragment, fluidity, and sacred ambiguity. These images, shaped by community and process, reject the expectation of coherence. Instead, they offer something more enduring: a connection to memory that moves, refuses, and insists. In the blur, Brewster finds a way to make absence felt—and belonging visible, even if not fully seen.