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A Brief History of Focus
The following lecture was presented in a somewhat different form at Bard College in 1998, and then in the present form at the Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, to accompany an exhibition of work by early pictorialist photographers. Thanks to Salvatore Scalora and Thomas Bruhn of the Benton for making it possible for me to speak at the museum.
©Charles Hagen 1998-2009
Thank you all for coming, and thank you, Sal and Tom, for inviting me here to speak in conjunction with this fascinating exhibition. What I hope to do today is provide a quick and hopefully provocative history of the idea of focus in photography. Focus came to be seen as the defining characteristic of pictorialism in photography, the subject of this show; it's also been at the heart of debates about the true nature of the medium since photography's invention. Moreover, it has extended into broader questions about art and society in an age of photographic media.
RICHTER, Gerhard: Great Sphinx of Giza, 1964 (150x170 cm)
Since the early 1960s the German painter Gerhard Richter has been painting distinctive works in which photographic images, taken from popular media sources or based on snapshot cliches, are presented as if out of focus, blurred and indistinct.
I find these works interesting both for what they are and what they aren't. They belong, of course, to a self-reflexive, somewhat austere German strain of Pop art that points ahead to the appropriation art of the 1980s, with its direct quotations of media images. But even though Richter's images refer to popular sources, no self-respecting commercial photographer, or for that matter an amateur, would make pictures as out of focus and difficult to read as the ones he presents in his paintings.
What this suggests to me is that in Richter's work a lack of sharpness comes to symbolize photography itself, to make clear that he is not interested simply in replicating photographic images, but that by throwing his stereotyped images out of focus, as it were, he can comment on the nature of photography and painting's relationship to it, as well as on photography's role in contemporary culture. In a wonderfully suggestive quote, Richter himself has noted that "There's no such thing as an out-of-focus painting."
What gives this work, and the work in this show, an extra degree of interest for me is that throughout the medium's history, critics and photographers have waged fierce debates over photography's ability to record the world with a degree of resolution that surpasses the ability of the human eye to see it. Major esthetic battles have been waged over the question of whether or not to accept the detail offered by the lens. In our own time, the issue of sharpness has once again come to the fore in the work of many photographers. I hope in this talk to trace, briefly, the history of this debate.
Technically, focus refers to a property of a lens that causes light rays to be gathered and directed towards a single point--the focal point. In practical terms this creates one plane of focus in a lens image; as every photo student knows, the size of the aperture through which light passes to reach the lens determines whether the focal plane will be just that, a plane, or whether a zone of apparent sharpness will be created that will include objects closer to or farther from the focal plane. This is the phenomenon known as depth of field. The smaller the aperture the more depth of field; the larger the aperture, the less depth of field.
Focus is an optical property. But the quality of sharp detail and out-of-focus fuzziness that it produces has come to be used in a wide variety of metaphorical ways as well. So we can talk about staying on focus, or being focused like a laser, or having things seem a bit out of focus and lacking in clarity.
Lack of sharpness in a photograph can stem from various sources, including camera shake, the subject moving at the moment of the exposure, and technical properties of the particular photographic process being used. But often these effects are referred to under the generic heading of focus--perhaps because focus is a quality that the photographer controls, rather than an unavoidable characteristic of the medium.
The concept has a history before photography
Like many other issues in the history of photography, the dispute over the representation of detail can be traced back in various forms through the history of art, long before photography was invented.
E.H. Gombrich, for example, discusses Horace's idea, in the first century B.C., that some pictures are meant to be seen close-up, while others are best seen from a distance. Gombrich also mentions the treatment of the same issue by the Renaissance historian and theorist Giorgio Vasari, and particularly Vasari's idea that rough detail can be a sign of heightened imagination, and thus of art. By contrast, in Gombrich's phrase, "careful finish betrays the artisan who has to observe the standards of the guild. The true artist, like the true gentleman, will work with ease."
--Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 193
Vasari's most extensive statement of this idea occurs in his discussion of Titian's late style.
[TITIAN: Pieta (detail), Accademia, Venice, 1575-6]
Titian's early works, Vasari wrote, were "'executed with a certain refinement and an incredible industry so that they can be seen at close quarters and from afar, while his last ones were executed with crudely daubed strokes and blobs in such a way that one sees nothing at close quarters, though they look perfect from a distance.'"
--Vasari, quoted in Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 195
Gombrich connects this to what he sees as a growing tendency in the 17th and 18th centuries toward acknowledging the role of the viewer in translating the forms and lines of a roughly painted work into a finished image, through an effort of imagination--in other words, as an early example of reception theory in critical thought, that the audience creates the meaning of a work of art.
More recently, various art historians have examined the importance of detail in Northern European paintings since the Renaissance, and particularly in Dutch art of the 17th century.
VERMEER, Jan: Allegory of the Art of Painting, c. 1670-75
Arthur K. Wheelock has pointed to the religious roots of this phenomenon; in Northern Europe, he writes, artists had long given "attention to the exact recording of the physical world. ...Philosophically this insistence on accurate representation was grounded in a conviction that all of God's creation was worthy of representation, the smallest as well as the largest. As [the German monk] Thomas a Kempis wrote in The Imitation of Christ [c. 1427]: "There is no creature so small and object that it representeth not the goodness of God."
[Arthur K. Wheelock, "Trompe-L'Oeil Painting: Visual Deceptions or Natural Truths?," in Age of the Marvelous, p. 183]
Svetlana Alpers, too, has discussed the differences between Northern European art and that of Southern Europe in terms that are particularly interesting for photographers. In The Art of Describing she ascribes to Northern painting, among other characteristics, "attention to many small things versus a few large ones"--in other words, attention to detail.
[Art of Describing, 44]
And in her book Rembrandt's Enterprise, Alpers refers to both Gombrich and Vasari's discussion of finished and unfinished styles in painting in her own treatment of the looseness of Rembrandt's paint handling.
None of these examples is directly related to issues of sharpness or lack of sharpness in photography, but taken together they form a suggestive backdrop of ideas and cultural assumptions against which later debates over detail in photography are played out.
First processes
When the first photographic processes were announced in 1839 there were two competing processes, with different abilities to render detail. Not surprisingly, the champions of each process proclaimed theirs to be preferable.
The first publicly announced photographic process was the Daguerreotype, invented by the painter and showman Louis Daguerre.
DAGUERRE, Louis J.M.: Tuileries and the Seine, made for Beaux Arts, 1838-9
By 1826, Daguerre had become enamored of the idea of inventing a working system of photography. When he finally succeeded and began to show the results publicly in early 1839, people marveled over their exquisitely fine detail. Contemporary accounts of this aspect of the new medium at times took on an almost metaphysical tinge.
Samuel F. B. Morse, American portrait painter, was in Paris to try to raise money to develop his electric telegraph, and went by Daguerre's studio to see the new pictures in March 1839.
DAGUERRE, Louis J.M.: Samuel F. B. Morse, 1845
His letter describing them was published in the New York Observer, April 20, 1839.
"...[T]he exquisite minuteness of the delineation cannot be conceived," Morse wrote. "No painting or engraving ever approached it. For example: In a view up the street, a distant sign would be perceived, and the eye could just discern that there were lines of letters upon it, but so minute as not to be read with the naked eye."
DAGUERRE, Louis J.M.: Boulevard du Temple, c. 1838 (daguerreotype)
"By the assistance of a powerful lens..., every letter was clearly and distinctly legible.... The effect of the lens upon the picture was in a great degree like that of the telescope in nature....
"...[T]his discovery is, therefore, about to open a new field of research in the depth of microscopic nature. We are soon to see if the minute has discoverable limits. The naturalist is to have a new kingdom to explore, as much beyond the microscope as the microscope is beyond the naked eye."
[Gernsheim]
Calotype
The calotype, the process announced in 1840 by the English gentleman-inventor William Henry Fox Talbot, had many advantages over the daguerreotype: most importantly, that it provided a negative, allowing many prints to be made of an image. Pictures were produced on paper rather than metal; because of this, calotypes were lighter, more portable; negative materials could even be prepared in advance. But because the negative was paper, the texture of the paper printed through into the final image. Nevertheless, these qualities were praised as more artistic, in part due to its broad tones, like those of a charcoal drawing.
Hill and Adamson
HILL & ADAMSON: Hugh Miller, 1843-7
The Edinburgh painter David Octavius Hill, who with his partner Robert Adamson produced some of the greatest examples of the calotype between 1843 and 1848, wrote about this in a letter in January 1848: "The rough surface, and unequal texture throughout the paper is the main cause of the Calotype failing in details, before the process of Daguerreotypy--and this is the very life of it. They look like the imperfect work of a man--and not the much diminished perfect work of God."
[Newhall, History of Photography, p. 48]
HILL & ADAMSON: Gordon Highlanders at Edinburgh Castle, 1845-6
But the overall trend throughout the early years of the medium was for greater detail. This was true even of the calotype; it wasn't really until 1851, when Gustave Le Gray announced his process for soaking the negative in wax, thereby suppressing some of the texture of the paper suppport, that the calotype achieved great popularity.
DUCAMP, Maxime: Abu Simbel, c. 1850 (salted paper print from waxed paper neg)
GREENE, John B.: The Nile, 1853-4
Wet-plate collodion process
The search for greater detail in a positive-negative process also led to the development of the wet-plate collodion process, announced in 1851 by F. Scott Archer; this was to become the standard photographic process for the next thirty years. The wet-plate process was not easier than the calotype; the negative had to be sensitized, exposed and developed within about 15 or 20 minutes, while the emulsion was still wet. Because of this, photographers had to carry their darkrooms with them, in order to process the picture on the spot.
ANONYMOUS ENGRAVING: Photographer's tent, c. 1870s
But because the negative was on glass, wet plates gave great detail, and the collodion process quickly became the dominant medium.
FRITH, Francis: Fallen Colossus, c. 1858
Sir William Newton
Despite this popular demand for detail, many early critics and artists expressed the belief that photographs provided too much detail of the subjects. In 1853 Sir William Newton, miniaturist to William IV and then to Queen Victoria, who became a photographer and landscape painter after 1853, proposed a controversial solution to this perceived drawback.
NEWTON, Sir William: Birnham Beeches, 1855
"[T]he general tone of nature has yet to be accomplished by means of Photography," Newton wrote. "I do not conceive it to be necessary or desirable for an artist to represent ... every minute detail, but to endeavor at producing a broad and general effect...: and indeed, for this purpose, I do not consider it necessary that the whole of the subject should be what is called in focus; on the contrary, I have found in many instances that the object is better obtained by the whole subject being a little out of focus, thereby giving a greater breadth of effect, and consequently more suggestive of the true character of nature...."
Lady Eastlake
Newton's criticism of photographic detail as inartistic was seconded by Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, who in 1857 wrote one of the most insightful early discussions of photography.
HILL & ADAMSON, Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, 1843-47
"...If the photograph in its early and imperfect scientific state was more consonant to our feelings for art," she wrote, "it is because, as far as it went, it was more true to our experience of Nature. Mere broad light and shade, with the correctness of general forms and absence of all convention, which are the beautiful conditions of photography, will, when nothing further is attempted, give artistic pleasure of a very high kind; it is only when greater precision and detail are superadded that the eye misses the further truths which should accompany the further finish...."
Delacroix
The great Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix made extensive use of photographs, some of which he posed himself, as studies for his paintings. But he criticized photography for providing too much detail and for its mathematically exact perspective.
In 1859 he wrote:
"One must make more allowances for the distortions in a photographic reproduction than in a work of the imagination.... If the eye had the perfection of a magnifying glass, nature would become unbearable: one would see all the leaves on a tree, all the tiles of a roof and on those tiles the mosses, insects and so on. ..."
(Scharf, p. 146; first pub. in 1859.)
What all of these quotes suggest, I think, is that the writers were appealing to two different kinds of truth: on the one hand, photographic truth, or the truth of science and the machine, and on the other hand, artistic truth, which they defined as the truth of human experience and emotions.
Julia Margaret Cameron
Another example of the tangled beliefs about the relationship of photographic detail and art can be found in the career of Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79), the most important figure in English amateur photography of this period. In the photographs of friends and relatives she made at her home on the Isle of Wight, Cameron deliberately rejected sharp focus in favor of emotional expression.
CAMERON, Julia Margaret: The Astronomer: Sir John Herschel, 1867
CAMERON, Julia Margaret: Thomas Carlyle, 1867
Cameron wrote Sir John Herschel that she hoped to elevate her art beyond
"mere conventional topographic Photography--map making & skeleton rendering of feature & form without the 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--"
Cameron, letter to Sir John Herschel, 12/31/1864, in Newhall, Hist, p. 78
CAMERON, Julia Margaret: Prayer and Praise, 1865
In Annals of My Glass House (1874) she wrote, "When focussing and coming to something which, to my eye, was very beautiful, I stopped there instead of screwing on the lens to the more definite focus which all other photographers insist upon." She also used long exposures: 3-7 minutes, which caused blurring.
P. H. Emerson
In the 1880's Peter Henry Emerson advanced the novel idea that photographers should make use of selective focus, with only one point in a picture being in focus and the rest more or less fuzzy.
EMERSON, P.H.: Rowing Home the Schoof-Stuff, 1886
Emerson came to this idea as a result of the physiological studies of the German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz, who pointed out that we see only one part of a scene sharply, and the rest is more or less a blur. Of course, our eyes are constantly moving; morever, there is no real reason to relate a photograph to the image received on the retina. But Emerson argued that selective focus was truer to perception and to art, and his advocacy of it was extremely influential.
In 1889, in his book Naturalistic Photography, Emerson wrote:
"[A] picture should not be quite sharply focussed in any part, for then it becomes false; it should be made just as sharp as the eye sees it and no sharper, for it must be remembered the eye does not see things as sharply as the photographic lens....The rule in focussing, therefore, should be, focus for the principal object of the picture, but all else must not be sharp; and even that principal object must not be as perfectly sharp as the optical lens will make it."
in Turner & Wood, P.H. Emerson (1974), 7
But Emerson also reiterates the standard 19th century line that too much detail is inconsistent with art. In 1889 he wrote:
"The student will see it constantly advocated that every detail of a picture should be impartially rendered with a biting accuracy, and this in all cases. This biting sharpness being, as landscape painters say, "Quite fatal from the artistic standpoint." If the rendering were always given sharply, the work would belong to the category of topography or the knowledge of places, that is Science...."
[paper read at the Camera Club Conference in London, Mar. 26, 1889; included in Naturalistic Photography, 3rd ed., (New York: Scovill & Adams, 1899), Appendix A, pp. 67-79 [Photographers on Photography, p.
Impressionism
The history of the Impressionism is vast and beyond my expertise, but I want to touch on it briefly here since it forms part of the artistic backdrop to photographic debates about sharpness.
MONET, Claude: Impression: Sunrise,1872 (o/c, 48x63")
This is the painting that gave the movement its name, Claude Monet's Impression: Sunrise, from 1872, which shows the port of Le Havre at sunrise.
SEURAT, Georges: Woman seated by an easel, c. 1884-88 (chalk/wove paper)
And in the 1880's Helmholz's research also influenced the work of Georges Seurat and the neo-Impressionists. I find it interesting that, traveling by very different roads, both Emerson and Seurat appealed to scientific theories of perception to produce pictures in which detail was reduced. The influence of both of them can be seen, I think, in the rise of Pictorialism in photography.
Pictorialism
By far the most famous debate over sharpness in photography took place among the various factions of pictorialism, the turn-of-the-century movement whose adherents were concerned with the artistic potential of photography. One crucial way that many pictorialists used to make their work art was to employ such processes as bromoil, oil or gum prints, all of which produced broad effects of tone, and allowed photographers to obscure or eliminate detail in their prints. A strong advocate of this kind of approach was Robert Demachy, the French photographer who reintroduced the gum process, which had been invented in the 1850s and later largely forgotten.
DEMACHY, Robert: (Tondo--youth), 1898
In 1907 Demachy wrote that "A work of art must be a transcription, not a copy, of nature..." Gum and oil prints, Demachy argued, allowed "liberty of treatment and liberty of correction" of prints, and opened "outer and inner doors to personal treatment."
WHITE, Clarence H.: Ring Toss CW 1903
But as the critic Sadakichi Hartmann noted, "'individual expression' became synonymous with 'painter-like expression," and soon photographers were producing works designed specifically to look like charcoal sketches or other works in other media. Some critics derided the results as "fuzzography." "It became the fashion to blur objects," Hartmann wrote in 1904, "and the so-called 'cult of the spoilt print' set in."
STEICHEN, Edward: Self-Portrait with Brush and Palette, 1902
Many Pictorialists used soft-focus effects because they demonstrated the artist's involvement in the process of making the print; the photographs could thus be seen as handcrafted objects, and not simply the product of what Lady Eastlake had called "an unfeeling machine." This prejudice against the machine and in favor of the hand made goes back to John Ruskin and the Arts and Crafts movement of the mid 19th century. Blur and fuzziness also came to signify intense emotion, perhaps by analogy to the difficulty of seeing one's surroundings when experiencing strong emotions--for example, the way tears will well up and cloud vision.
KASEBIER, Gertrude: The Manger, 1899; CW 1903
SEELEY, George H.: Untitled (Winter Landscape), 1909
Other photographers tried to combine straight photographic methods with soft or nebulous subject matter, in order to retain photographic detail while gaining emotional expressiveness. The best-known example of this is Alfred Stieglitz, the most important champion of Pictorialism, who photographed smoke, steam, mist, reflections, and clouds while sticking to relatively straightforward techniques.
STIEGLITZ, Alfred: The Hand of Man, 1902
Modernism
But in the early years of this century a new generation of photographers reacted against the soft-focus effects and sentimentality of Pictorialism, and instead advocated a hard-edged sharpness reflective of an industrial age. A key figure in this rise of photographic Modernism was Paul Strand.
STRAND, Paul: Trees and White Farm House, 1915-16
STRAND, Paul: Lathe, 1923
In the artistic turmoil around World War I, Strand became an effective polemicist on behalf of modernism, both in art and in photography. In a lecture in October 1923, Strand expanded on his view of photographic detail, arguing that the camera--which he significantly called "the camera machine"--can "record the differentiation of the textures of objects as the human hand cannot....[W]hen [the photographer] does select the moment, the light, the objects, he must be true to them. If he includes in his space a strip of grass, it must be felt as the living differentiated thing it is, and so recorded....You must use and control objectivity through photography because you cannot evade or gloss over by the use of unphotographic methods."
"The Art Motive in Photography," Br J Ph, vol. 70, pp. 612-15 (Photographers on Photography, 146-47; based on lecture at the C. White School, 1923.
Edward Weston:
Probably the most dogmatic application of the idea of sharpness as a modernist essential came in the work of Edward Weston and other photographers on the West Coast. Like Strand, Weston had been a successful Pictorialist before switching to Modernist sharpness in the 1920s.
WESTON, Edward: Prologue to a Sad Spring, 1920
WESTON, Edward: Artichoke Halved, 1930
In 1934, Weston wrote that a photograph should be "sharply focussed, clearly defined from edge to edge, from nearest object to most distant. It should have a smooth or glossy surface to better reveal the amazing textures and details to be found only in a photograph. Its value should be clear cut, subtle or brilliant, never veiled."
[quoted by John Paul Edwards, "Group F:64," Camera Craft, March 1935; in Seeing Straight, 61]
Group f/64
Weston was at the center of a group of West Coast modernists, including Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Willard Van Dyke, who in 1932 formed what was known as Group f/64. These photographers were all devoted to sharp focus, and even took their name from the f/stop on a lens reputed to provide the sharpest possible image.
ADAMS, Ansel: Winter Sunrise, the Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine, Calif., 1944
CUNNINGHAM, Imogen: Leaf Pattern, c. 1924
But the real issue that the photographers of f/64 were concerned with was simply that photography be true to itself. As Willard Van Dyke wrote in 1938, "All of [the members] believed that photography must use its own peculiar powers, acknowledge its own limitations, and that it should never be influenced by painting, or any other graphic art." [Seeing Straight, p. 64] This adherence to what was "purely photographic" left open many doors by which to leave the rigid house of technique constructed by Weston and his followers.
Breaking away
The widespread adoption of the 35mm. camera, starting in the 1920s, allowed photographers to make use of the emotional connotations of lack of sharpness in their images while remaining true to the Modernist insistence on employing strictly photographic means. These photographers could reject any non-photographic intervention or manipulation, but accept, and even seek out, inherent flaws of the process if they add to the expressiveness of the image.
This can be seen in the work of many photographers--for example, in early pictures by Henri Cartier-Bresson, like this one, where the boy appears slightly out of focus, as if dreaming, surrounded by the jagged edges of building edges and shadows, or this one, where the two gypsy boys puff away at their cigarettes with manic glee, the clouds of smoke casting a mysterious air over the image.
CARTIER-BRESSON, Henri: Seville [boy in shadows], 1932
CARTIER-BRESSON, Henri: Gypsies, Seville, 1933
BRODOVITCH, Alexey: from Ballet, 1945
More explicitly, this strategy of using effects of blur and soft-focus can be seen in this book, Ballet. Published in 1945, Ballet presents photographs taken by Alexey Brodovitch, the great designer and art director. Brodovitch took the photos in Ballet in the 1930s, of the Ballets Russes. Made with a small camera in available light, the pictures rely heavily on effects of blur and focus to heighten the sense of extreme emotion in the pictures, and the ballet itself.
BRODOVITCH, Alexey: from Ballet 1945
Increasingly, by this time questions of blur and focus were no longer about the nature of perception or the essence of photography, and instead these effects, like crisp detail, had become rhetorical tools a photographer could use to inflect the emotional impact of a picture. Robert Frank, in The Americans, made masterful use of a range of these and other effects, including high-contrast printing and enlarged grain.
FRANK, Robert: Assembly Line--Detroit, 1955
FRANK, Robert: Movie Premiere--Hollywood, 1955
60s/70s
If effects of blur and soft focus were accepted in journalistic photography of the sort Frank and others practiced in the 1950's, they became even more prevalent in art photography, particularly after the rise of Pop art in the early 1960s. Artists like Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg began to incorporate photographs into their works on canvas, challenging the idea of the autographic brushstroke that had dominated art after World War II.
Rauschenberg and Warhol were concerned not with photography as a fine art, but with its role as a mass medium--with photographic reproductions rather than fine prints. Both artists used silkscreen techniques, echoing and accentuating the halftone screens found in the source images they used, which were often taken from tabloids and magazines.
This renewed acceptance of photographic images of any sort led art photographers like Robert Heinecken--who was himself trained as a printmaker--to accept the lack of definition of media images in their own images. In Heinecken's "Are U Rea" series, he used magazine pages as if they were paper negatives. The resulting images combine effects of chance and collage, but like calotypes they also incorporate the texture of the paper into the finished work.
A renewed interest in non-standard photographic processes in the 1970s also led to a move away from qualities of sharpness that had been esteemed at the height of Modernism in the 1930's. Betty Hahn, for example, began to embroider onto photographs printed on cloth. Ruth Thorne-Thompson produced pinhole camera shots onto paper negatives that made specific reference to 19th century exploration photographs of Ducamp and Greene; Linda Connor began to photograph with a soft-focus lens that her uncle had used in the early years of the century when he was a student at the Clarence White School in New York.
At the same time many photographers explicitly rejected the emphasis on photographic craft championed by Ansel Adams and others. Nancy Rexroth, in the photographs in her 1977 book Iowa, taken between 1970 and '76, used a cheap Diana camera; many others followed her lead.
New Topographics
Perhaps in response to this, or more probably as part of a growing awareness of the rich vernacular history of the medium, other photographers in the 1970s turned to highly detailed, sharp focus images, particularly of landscapes. Many of these photographers worked with large-format cameras; collectively they became known as New Topographics photographers, after a show curated by William Jenkins at the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., in 1975. Photographers in the show included Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and others.
Contemporary
These directions from the '70s and before continue to exert considerable influence on the work of contemporary photographers.
Jan Groover came to prominence with a series of cool, conceptually based images in which two or three images would be linked by shared formal issues. But beginning in the late 1970s she began to photograph arrangements of silverware and vegetables, in a color series that recalls the work of Edward Weston. Both in black and white and color, Groover plays with focus and detail as a way to direct attention, as a kind of directorial tool, within her dramatic narratives of forms. I find a strong element of set design in many of her operatic constructions.
Barbara Ess uses pinhole cameras to make her oversized color prints. The blurriness provides her with an expressive tool for these staged dramas; she photographs on black and white film, and then prints them on color paper, choosing which color to use to achieve the maximum emotional effect.
For the past five years Bill Jacobson has been making extremely out of focus images of this sort. In his first series Jacobson photographed single figures against plain white backgrounds; the figures seem to be fading from the print, and Jacobson, who is gay, explicitly linked the images to the idea of people, and especially people killed by AIDS, fading from memory. Jacobson's most recent series are more general in their references, and use the lack of sharpness to emphasize the gestures of his subjects.
David Levinthal has worked for more than two decades with dolls and other figurines, photographing them closeup and from low angles. Part of Levinthal's work has to do with the range of figures that have been made into dolls; he's photographed Nazi dolls that he bought in antique shops in Austria, sex figurines from Japan, and cowboy and Indian dolls from the U.S. But the play with focus is crucial in making the figures seem about to come to life.
Uta Barth is a German-born photographer who teaches at the University of California at Riverside. For the past five years or so she has produced color photographs based on the notion of an absent subject. In one early group, Barth posed people as if for a portrait, then had them leave the frame before she took the picture. What's left is an out of focus picture of the background. Barth's images are tantalizing, because they suggest that a particular background implies a particular subject--and that we should be able to figure out what it is. Her more recent works seem to invite the viewer to relax and let the background flow around you, as if you'd just come back from the doctor with dilated eyes. But I continue to find the urge to focus overwhelming.
These are from a show currently at Postmasters gallery in Chelsea, in New York, by an artist named Alix Pearlstein. The show includes a videotape in which Pearlstein interacts with tiny figures cut out of magazines, but also a series of large color photographs that Pearlstein calls "Parallel Play," in which she is seen in focus interacting with out-of-focus cutouts. The figures themselves are only an inch or two high; not only is Pearlstein playing with the question of whether the out of focus figures are alive, but also with the deceptions of photographic scale.
Future
With digitized images beginning to replace the familiar chemical/optical processes that have defined photography, the issue of sharpness and detail changes. Sharpness can be seen explicitly as a function of the amount of information within a given image--and different degrees of resolution can be selected for different purposes. William J. Mitchell notes that the eye's resolving power is roughly 1/60 of a degree, and that as a result an 8x10 print must consist of about 3 million pixels to appear completely smooth. Using 256 levels of gray, Mitchell calculates that a good 4x5 inch print can be expressed in an image file of 12 megabytes.
--W. J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye (MIT Press, 1992)
Obviously this doesn't take into account the question of whether more than 256 levels of gray may be needed to provide a psychologically satisfying illusion of continuous tones, or whether the eye somehow senses the superfluity of detail in photographs that produced a sense of wonder in early observers of the daguerreotype. But it does suggest that the question of sharpness and detail, which has for such a long time been used to decide whether or not photographs were or could be art, may be changing to another form altogether.
The end of the optical
Another aspect of this change is that an increasing number of imaging tools no longer entail lenses as we know them. Sonograms, X-rays, magnetic resonance imaging devices, all provide us with pictures but do not entail lenses. The question of focus, again, shifts to one of resolution and information.
The daguerreotype was called the mirror with a memory; in the future the sharpness of a digital image will depend on just how much memory--computer memory--you can afford.
And so we come back to the out-of-focus paintings of Gerhard Richter. This is another work by him from the same period, Pyramid, from 1964. The piece we saw earlier seemed to me more blurred, where this seems more out of focus. But in either case we are left with the question: what do they mean? How is that this lack of sharpness has become the symbolic essence of photography?
Of course there is no definitive answer. But to my mind there is a sense of loss, even nostalgia about these paintings. We no longer seem able to believe, as the Victorians did, in the ability of photographs to record even the events and things of the world, let alone, as some photographers believed, to nature of the soul. But this new awareness of the limits of our knowledge, and of the depths of our uncertainty, is not a condition limited to photography. I think it pervades our lives as we try to find an appropriate ideology to replace the sense of optimism and progress that defined the industrial age. I find it very interesting and hopeful that photography, in Richter's paintings and elsewhere, continues to provide us with practical, artistic and philosophical tools in this search.
SLIDES:
RICHTER, Gerhard: Great Sphinx of Giza, 1964 (150x170 cm)
TITIAN: Pieta (detail), 1575-6 (, Accademia, Venice; finished by Palma)
VERMEER, Jan: Allegory of the Art of Painting, c. 1670-75
DAGUERRE, Louis J.M.: Tuileries and the Seine, made for Beaux Arts, 1838-9 (daguerreotype)
DAGUERRE, Louis J.M.: Samuel F. B. Morse, 1845 (daguerreotype)
DAGUERRE, Louis J.M. Boulevard du Temple, c. 1838 (daguerreotype)
HILL & ADAMSON: Hugh Miller, 1843-7
HILL & ADAMSON: Gordon Highlanders @ Edinburgh Castle, 1845-6
DUCAMP, Maxime: Abu Simbel, c. 1850 (salted paper print from waxed paper neg)
GREENE, John B.: The Nile, 1853-4
UNKNOWN ENGRAVING: Photographer's tent, c. 1870s
FRITH, Francis: Fallen Colossus, c. 1858
NEWTON, Sir William: Birnham Beeches, 1855
HILL & ADAMSON: Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, 1843-47
CAMERON, Julia Margaret: The Astronomer: Sir John Herschel, 1867
CAMERON, Julia Margaret: Thomas Carlyle, 1867
CAMERON, Julia Margaret: Prayer and Praise, 1865
EMERSON, P.H.: Rowing Home the Schoof-Stuff, 1886
EMERSON, P.H.: The Snow Garden, 1895
MONET, Claude: Impression: Sunrise, 1872 (o/c, 48x63")
SEURAT, Georges: Woman seated by an easel, c. 1884-88 (chalk/wove paper)
DEMACHY, Robert: (Tondo--youth), 1898
WHITE, Clarence H.: Ring Toss, Camera Work 1903
STEICHEN, Edward: Self-Portrait with Brush and Palette, 1902
KASEBIER, Gertrude: The Manger, 1899; Camera Work 1903
SEELEY, George H.: Untitled (Winter Landscape), 1909
STIEGLITZ, Alfred: The Hand of Man, 1902
STRAND, Paul: Trees and White Farm House, 1915-16
STRAND, Paul: Lathe, 1923
WESTON, Edward: Prologue to a Sad Spring, 1920
WESTON, Edward: Artichoke Halved, 1930
ADAMS, Ansel: Winter Sunrise, the Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine, Calif.,1944
CUNNINGHAM, Imogen: Leaf Pattern, c. 1924
CARTIER-BRESSON, Henri: Seville [boy in shadows], 1932
CARTIER-BRESSON, Henri: Gypsies, Seville, 1933
BRODOVITCH, Alexey: from Ballet, 1945
BRODOVITCH, Alexey: from Ballet, 1945
FRANK, Robert: Assembly Line--Detroit, 1955 (from The Americans)
FRANK, Robert: Movie Premiere--Hollywood, 1955 (from The Americans)
RAUSCHENBERG, Robert: Retroactive I, 1964 (o/c, 84x60")
HEINECKEN, Robert: from "Are You Rea," 1964-68 (lithograph)
HAHN, Betty:Garden Portrait, 1973 (gum bichromate on muslin with embroidery)
THORNE-THOMSEN, Ruth: Liberty Head, Illinois, 1978 (pinhole/paper negative)
CONNOR, Linda: Untitled, 1973
REXROTH, Nancy: Cow's face, McArthur, Ohio, 1975
ADAMS, Robert: "Frontier" Gas Station and Pike's Peak, Colorado Springs, 1969
BALTZ, Lewis: from New Industrial Pks Near Irvine, California
BECHER, Bernd & Hilla: Jeddo Coal Company, Hazleton, Pa., 1974
GROOVER, Jan: Untitled, 1978
GROOVER, Jan: Untitled, 1985
GROOVER, Jan: Untitled, 1989
ESS, Barbara: Untitled, 1986
ESS, Barbara: Untitled, 1984-86
ESS, Barbara: Untitled, 1988
JACOBSON, Bill: Interim Portrait #373, 1992
JACOBSON, Bill: Song of Sentient Beings #1617, 1995
JACOBSON, Bill: Song of Sentient Beings #1588, 1995
LEVINTHAL, David
LEVINTHAL, David
LEVINTHAL, David
BARTH, Uta: Ground #2, 1992-93
BARTH, Uta: Field #9, 1995
BARTH, Uta: Field #13, 1996
PEARLSTEIN, Alix: from "Parallel Play," 1998
PEARLSTEIN, Alix: from "Parallel Play," 1998
PEARLSTEIN, Alix: from "Parallel Play," 1998
[DIGITAL IMAGING]: Perspective view of volcano on Venus, from Magellan radar data, c. 1992
[DIGITAL IMAGING]: Varying spatial and tonal resolution [breakdown of Einstein's face into blocks of tone], from William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye, MIT Press, 1992
RICHTER, Gerhard: Pyramide, 1966 (o/c)
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