If the eye has a focal distance for any particular scene, might it also have a focal period, a time span in which an image can be apprehended in perfect focus? The idea occurs to me because of a possibility floated in the last Aperture of the 1960s, a monograph dedicated to W. Eugene Smith that gathers together his sublime expressionist images of atrocity, deprivation, and ordinary pleasure, from the invasion of Iwo Jima to Charlie Chaplin, Haiti, and the KKK.
In an afterword on Smith’s work, subtitled “Success or Failure: Art or History,” the critic, collector, and all-around polymath Lincoln Kirstein chews over the
