Soft- Focus Landscapes: De Meyer, who had begun exhibiting in 1894, was now producing portraits and large-scale still life arrangements taken with a soft- focus landscapesfocus 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 landscapesfocus lens, no part of the image is ever sharp because in their manufacture no correction is made for spherical aberration.
Eduard J. Steichen* of Milwaukee first became known for the pictures he sent to the 1899 Philadelphia Salon when he was only twenty years old; his impressionist, soft- focus landscapesfocus landscapes such as A Frost-Covered Pool were at once controversial.
The most curious of the photographers identified with the new pictorial movement in America was Fred Holland Day, of Boston. He outraged critics by reenacting for the camera, on a hill outside Boston in the summer of 1898, the Passion of Our Lord, with himself as Jesus Christ.
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.
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Photography
