[Winter 2026]

Sandra Brewster, Blur
by Sofia Belmenouar

Montréal, Free Pony Press, 2025, 200 pages

[EXCERPT]

Faces slip, vibrate, almost vanish, refusing obstinately to come to a stop. As I riffle through Sandra Brewster’s photographs in Blur – as if it were a flipbook – the portraits begin to dance in my hands. Although it’s just an illusion formed by the quick succession of still images, something about the instant the picture was taken – a body moving, a gesture being made – is rendered. The effect is striking. As I flip through the pages, my gesture becomes part of the dynamic of elusiveness, a resistance to being fixed. I also reactivate the very core of Brewster’s approach: to capture identity through its movement, its constitutive instability.

[…]

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 131 – Collecting ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: Blur]

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Safia Belmenouar holds a doctorate in aesthetics of photography and is an independent exhibition curator and author. She researches the relationships among fiction, documentary, and archives, envisaged as images’ narrative potentialities. More particularly, she connects them to the transmission and appropriation of visual stories, in which photography is addressed as a space for active identity construction.