All a Blur: Photographs from the Infinity Series, with Bill Armstrong

Join us for a conversation with Bill Armstrong to celebrate his new book, a stunning meditation on the granular elements of personal history, spirituality, philosophy, and the medium of photography itself. He will be in conversation, followed by a signing.

PLEASE NOTE: RSVPs are encouraged but not required. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served. Doors open at 5:30 pm.

Can't attend? (please specify that you would like it signed in the comments box at checkout).

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: color and focus.

All A Blur showcases Mr. Armstrong's Infinity series, an ongoing project he has been working on for over twenty-five years. The book presents twenty-one 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 color. By taking away focus and the usual expectations of photography, Armstrong is able to investigate the qualities and effects of pure color in a profound way, freed from the limits of representation.

Bill Armstrong is an internationally acclaimed fine art photographer based in New York. His work is represented by CLAMP in New York, Dolby Chadwick in San Francisco, Hackelbury Fine Art in London and Alessia Paladini Gallery in Milan. His Infinity series has been exhibited in over thirty solo and 100 group exhibitions over the past twenty-five years.

Mr. Armstrong’s Sistine Gestures, Last Judgment is a permanent installation in the Vatican Museums at the foot of the stairs to the Sistine Chapel. Currently the work is on loan to the Casa Buonarroti in Florence for the exhibition La Sistina di Michelangolo. Un' icona multimediale. As well as the Vatican, his work is in many museum collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, The J. Paul Getty Museum Getty Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. His photographs have been published in more than sixteen books on photography, including the cover of Lyle Rexer’s Edge of Vision, The Rise of Abstraction in Photography. Mr. Armstrong is on the faculty of International Center of Photography. He was on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts from 2003-2022. His website is billarmstrongphotography.com and his work can be found on Instagram at @billarmstrongphoto.

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