Unfocused Days

Series of 7, C-print on aluminium, 40x60cm, 81x54cm or 113×75 cm

edition of  10 + 2 AP

The photo series Unfocused Days creates an image of the inner world of the person portrayed. Not the beautiful, happy or balanced image that people often wish to convey, but the emotions that people are less likely to show: despair, doubt and sadness, as well as stillness and contemplation. Because the photo is out of focus, the person portrayed dares to show their true feelings and the viewer is enabled to project their own emotions onto what they see. Unfocused Days hangs at eye level and the photos are mounted on thin aluminum, so that it looks like you are looking into a mirror. The series of 7 resonates with the days of the week, but also with the lifecycle of 7 years. It shows a passage of time and it is a journey of emotions with its own dramaturgy: the construction of the successive images makes visible a process of suffering, with a kind of redemption or enlightenment at the end. The person depicted is Roos herself. For 2 years she took hundreds of unsharp pictures with the self-timer, during this period she struggled with depression and recovered from it. It can be seen as a diary; the heaviness and struggle, but also the recovery and relief are palpable. 

Unfocused Days is inspired by the paintings of Matthijs Maris (1839–1917), who made vague, almost abstract portraits of mostly women.

Parool 28 maart 2019:”The first association is with the photos of the German photographer Michael Wolf. At Shimo-Kitazawa Station in Tokyo, he took photographs of squashed commuters behind stained glass. Almost anonymous. Just as you could characterize this ‘blurry’ photo with the word anonymous. It is an image by artist Roos van Geffen from the series Unfocused Days. With this she wants to show the inner world of the person portrayed. (…) Van Geffen hung the life-size photos at eye level, so that it is as if you are looking in the mirror. The blur makes identification with the person portrayed impossible and the viewer can ‘project his own feeling onto what he sees’. Van Geffen was also inspired by the ‘faintly grained’ canvases of painter Matthijs Maris (1839-1917).” Maarten Moll