Degenerative Art
Ever since Louis Daguerre’s Daguerreotypes were introduced in 1839 photography became (for a while) a purveyor of ultra-sharp reality. The result of this started the French contrary attitude art movement Expressionism in which the heretofore sharp reality of Ernest Meisonnier lost popularity to the blur.
Because of the advent of Expressionism photographer Steiglitz started the Group F64 in the beginning of the 20thcentury that brought back the original photographic concept of sharpness.
And so it has been through the 20thand perhaps the 21stcentury where pictorial art and photographic art shift their direction to an opposite.
Before the advent of Photoshop and particularly in the 1940s, a Mecca for Hollywood glamour photography, portraits of leading ladies went under the retoucher’s brush. Large 8x10 or 11x14 inch b+w negatives had face skin scraped off. When the airbrush came into fashion later faces were pristine and skin pore-free.
Many of my portraits of women for magazines in the 80s and early 90s were printed as colour prints and then sent to the airbrush artist to fix.
For portraits that we took for our own needs photographers used all kinds of soft-focus filters, rubbing Vaseline on the edges of a clear filter in front of a lens or (my fave) a stretched black nylon stocking in front of my lens.
In the darkroom we would print negatives in high contrast and then pull from the developer before detail began to show in the face. Every photographer had a secret formula for this.
Photoshop and in particular something called Diffuse Glow killed all previous retouching methods.
The Photoshop Patch Tool could and can remove under-eye bags in a second.The airbrushed photograph gave way to the Photoshopped photograph.
During the early 80s I loved a particular Kodak film called Technical Pan. It was super sharp but its extended red sensitivity rendered skin almost flawless.
Right processed in Corel Paintshop ProX2 Time Machine Early Colour
It is almost difficult for me to explain my current excitement in bringing back a technique that I loved by the end of the 90s. This was the pinhole. I had pinholes drilled into the body caps of my Mamiya and my Nikons. The results were an almost hard to predict soft focus image.
Now at this date and as of last night I have put to test a pinhole body cap for my Fuji digital cameras. The cap also fits my Nikon 35s which means in the next while I will be shooting digital and film pinhole portraits. And this goes hand in hand with my current love of the questionable lack of sharpness of my iPhone3G photos.
Originally published at blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com.
