Ostensibly shot from a moving train, Eileen Neff’s blurry, digitally altered photographs are less about the passing landscape than about the blur itself. They concern the inadequacy of perception to its object, which can never be brought into lasting focus. It’s the old lesson of Impressionism, made an absolute by Cézanne and now a cliché. But in bespeaking the object’s ephemerality, the blur also acknowledges the transience of perception, pointing to what has been called the specious present—exactly what photography is uniquely equipped to reify. The blur, which Neff always juxtaposes with