Photo Focus: She blundered her way through technique, resorting to any means to get desired effects. The blurred, out-of-focus images that many critics deplored were deliberate. She wrote to her friend Sir John Herschel that she hoped to elevate her art beyond
mere conventional topographic photo focusgraphy-map making & skeleton rendering of feature & form without that roundness & fulness of force & feature that modelling of flesh & limb which the focus I use only can give tho' called & condemned as "out of focus'' What is focus-& who has a right to say what focus is the legitimate focus-My aspirations are to ennoble photo focusgraphy and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real & ideal & sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry & Beauty-,19.
De Meyer, who had begun exhibiting in 1894, was now producing portraits and large-scale still life arrangements taken with a soft-focus lens. This type of lens gave the pictorial photo focusgrapher an optical control that could not be gained simply by throwing the image out of focus. With a true soft-focus lens, no part of the image is ever sharp because in their manufacture no correction is made for spherical aberration. |
Photography
