Because detective shows and soap operas use this blurry-foreground move so regularly, its sudden ubiquity in the news represents a significant shift in register, or even genre, for journalism. Photojournalism has for decades restricted itself to a stark framing of visual facts, never wishing to compromise its evidentiary role in the narration for a more theatrical one. The best news photos deftly capture the drama with a shutter click, but that is also the abiding rule: it either happens in that click, or it doesn’t make it to print. Framing and depth-of-field are the only things the photographer can deploy in that moment, so that’s why they’re being used together and pushed to extraordinary limits in the rise of the blur.

— Rise of the Blur, Dushko Petrovich in n+1