Out Of 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 Photography-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 Photography 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 photographer 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.
"Healthy human eyes never saw any part of a scene out of focus,"10 and hinted that the Naturalists were indebted to him fot theii knowledge of composition. Emerson retorted, "I have yei to learn that any one statement or photograph of Mr H. P. Robinson has ever had the slightest effect upon m< except as a warning of what not to do."11 Many of Emer son's followers ignored his qualifying advice, and "sofi focus" photographs-derisively called "fuzzygraphs" bj some-began to appear in quantity.
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Photography
