Gabriel M.A.
My Red Dot Glows For You
If it's a trend, it's a very long trend. I remember when I was learning how to develop and print, that many of the "seasoned" members at the community darkroom had a "blurry" thing going on.
You could tell that there were two main veins, each with their small dissident core: the younger/newbie ones, always striving to have everything in focus, and have those prints as sharp and contrasty as possible (with MC paper). Their prints would be the flattest.
Then there were the older/seasoned ones, always striving to have their prints have the tones they wanted, really taking their time rinsing/washing their fiber paper. Their prints would be, of course, the wrinkliest.
Then there was the oddball who would have a mix of Anal-Adams-retentiveness when it came to exposure, development, and printing, and then the other extreme where the guy would make it a point to go against common sense and use spent developer, spent fixer, slightly expose film to light before development...and he used Rolleiflex and Hassies.
Anyway...it was the seasoned art students who tended to make those "ghastly", "sickly", "unfocused" prints, while the new students tended to make sharp sharp sharp shots of buildings, walls, gardens, trees...it was literally night and day.
There was one journalist who used the room for nonjournalism work. Best stuff I saw. It was by watching him that I learned a lot.
But I'm on a tangent.
There is a very fine line between "blurry" shots and "lacking discipline". While in some B&W photo magazines I sometimes see what I saw in that darkroom, most of the "trendy blurry" stuff really doesn't work well on a poorly-printed medium such as a newstand magazine. Part of that process is the print itself. That gets lost on the magazine. Magazines are more about "the image" rather than "the work".
Hobbyists haven't been very exposed to the whole spectrum of what is possible in the world of photography. Hard-core wannabe "artists" think they can get away with anything by calling their stuff "art". It takes a very dedicated craftsman/craftswoman to be true to the Photography medium.
There are a lot of people who cut corners, financially, artistically, mentally. These are the kind that tend to spend more time marketing themselves. It is very very very difficult to assess the real worth of one kind of photography when one is bombarded with really mediocre sources and streams of it.
I would not so quick to judge one style based on something one sees in only one type of media.
