Overheard at MOMA about HCB: "why were so many of his photos out of focus?"

[robklurfield]

What other interesting commentary have any of you overheard in museums???

 

[amateriat]

- People might also be mistaking motion blur with missed focus, which is a problem with action shots.

Bingo. It's amazing how many people conflate OOF and motion-blur. Never mind bringing up depth of field/depth of focus.


- Barrett

 

[Chris101]

And you wonder why the digital shooters get a little uppity at times!

😛

Their cats have taken their cameras?

 

[amateriat]

Their cats have taken their cameras?

That might explain some of the stuff I come across online...


- Barrett

 

[JohnTF]

When I saw the large exhibit of HCB's work in Paris, all the prints were about 11x14, and in identical frames. It took up three floors of the Europeen Maison de Photographie.

When viewed at a normal viewing distance, the prints were something you want to see, really wonderful stuff.

Were they tack sharp through out every image, no.

Was the subject, composition, moment and rendition superb, yes.

Percentage of shots which I would have liked to see on a regular basis, more than 90%.

Impressive to see so much good work at one time.

If you are not impressed by such work in your presence, it is not the fault of the photographs I am afraid.

I do not think of a higher percentage of work I have seen at any exhibition that was as impressive.

Perhaps I just caught the good ones. ;-)


Regards, John

 

[Tracnac]

My personal conclusion... When you take an out of focus photo, you throw it. When HCB did the same : it's called ART.

Yvan.

 

[gliderbee]

That might explain some of the stuff I come across online...
- Barrett

Now, now, I see no reason whatsoever to start insulting cats ... Where's Greenpeace when you need them 😀 ?

 

[Gary Sandhu]

check out this one, out of focus and camera shake. These guyz sucked, eh?:angel:

 

[amateriat]

gliderbee: Ah, you misunderstand me...relative to their owners, I think a few of those felines have true potential! 😛


- Barrett

 

[Spyro]

😀

You gotta love digital cameras...

Because of them, all of a sudden you have all these people who never took an interest in art, who never went to a museum or a gallery or bought an art book, confronted with a whole new world that they dont understand... but they are determined to be a part of it, because now they have a DSLR and that makes them an artist, right? So they go ahead and read on the internet about this new photography thingo (still no intention of going to a museum or a gallery- too hard, internet is easier) and they come across the magic marketing term:

IMAGE QUALITY! Ahhhhh yes! Now it all makes sense! You spend the $$$, you get gooood camera, you get lotsa image quality, and good image quality = good photo! right? And then they discover bokeh, woohoo! Add a healthy dose of bokeh for good measure and you have a winner, right? Gallery stuff!

Nope 😀

Sorry. Its kinda hard to explain that technical issues may or may not matter, depending on the artist's intention. There are however other things that definitely matter, things like (caution: artspeak follows) context, emotion, content, mood, concept, aesthetic, cohesiveness and of course more pedestrian stuff that are particular to photography and painting, things like light, composition, timing, tonality and colour if applicable. When HCB's photos score so high on everything that matters, who cares about sharpness? And, to make things even more complicated for the guy who has now discovered this peculiar new art world, it is a world which is not always logical, or fair, or entirely free of trends and fashions. And if that is not enough, photography is the most complicated of all media to explain why it can be art, because of that misguided notion of "easy to make" that has been haunting from the start.

So when people ask me how come some guy's prints sell for $3,000 at XYZ gallery (no sharpness? no bokeh? WTF 😕), I just tell them that he probably had a really good lens 😀

 

[gliderbee]

Just to stirr up the debate a bit 😀:

I like a lot of the pictures of HCB (not all of them, but more then of my own 😱), but in a certain way, I can understand the comment of the visitor, mentioned in the first post.

Both a photographer and a painter have the choice to depict something (if that's what they are aiming at) in a sharp way or out of focus.

For a painter, it's obvious that it is done delibaratly ((e.g. the Flemish Primitives versus the Impressionists) , or out of necessity (e.g. I'm told that a human hand is one of the most difficult things to paint, so painting it a bit "blurry" might help hiding a lack of proficiency)
... but it's not so obvious for a photographer.

I fully agree that a picture does not necessarily have to be in focus to be a good picture, on the contrary; the picture shown earlier, taken by Robert Capa, wouldn't be as impressive if it were in focus: that would have attracted the attention too much on the person of the individual soldier (a bit like "and here's our Johnny swimming ashore, and here's our Johnny eating breakfast, and ... (you know the kind)).
By being out of focus, the figure can stand as a symbol for every soldier in a comparable situation. Same goes for the person on the bicycle in the picture of HCB.

But was this picture intended that way by the photographer ? IOW, was the OOF delibarate ?
I doubt it.
But then, does it matter if it was delibarate or not ?
Is it "more art" if it was delibarate OOF, and "less art" if it was not delibarate OOF ?
Does the qualification of "art" depends on the intention of the maker, or of the impression it makes on the viewer ? Or both ?
Can "accidents" be art ?

So, back to the beginning: maybe the question of the visitor: "why are so many of his pictures out of focus" was not so bad after all, depending on your point of view ?

Stefan.

 

[jfretless]

My personal conclusion... When you take an out of focus photo, you throw it. When HCB did the same : it's called ART.

Yvan.

This is part reason I don't delete anything images I've taken, oof, tack sharp, mistakes, keep it all. I believe the current fad of ultra sharp "surgical" 1:1 viewing of images is just that... a fad.

Someday, hopefully sooner than later, the pictures of cats next to your keyboard, and shots of newspaper print from twenty paces, on a tri pod, mirror lock up, remote shutter release, micro adjusting lenses, sending in lenses and bodies four times for calibration will cease. The subject of images will once again the priority, not the technical data.

Sometimes a OOF shot, accident or on purpose, is better than a sharp one.

..having said that, I do believe HCB and other masters are granted some leniency on their less than stellar images.

John

 

[Nigel Meaby]

The Robert Capa photograph above was not fuzzy and out of focus. It was produced by a freak processing accident. The films were processed with understandably some urgency but the guy who put the negs in the drying cabinet "cooked" the negs by having the temperature too high. Most of Capa's negs from the d-day landings were ruined but a few salvageable frames such as this one some could argue were actually enhanced by this accident making a far more evocative image of the d-day landings. This really does open up a whole new debate as the resulting image was created by a freak accident.

 

[dfoo]

Didn't he say they were shaky and out of focus, mostly because he was scared out of his wits and shaking like crazy?

 

[rxmd]

Sharp focus is such a bourgeois concept...

Cartier-Bresson was about as bourgeois as it gets.

 

[Harry Lime]

check out this one, out of focus and camera shake. These guyz sucked, eh?:angel:

He probably should have used a tripod.

 

[gliderbee]

Nigel, you're right: I knew it but completely forgot about that; nevertheless, it doesn't prove the shot was in focus, but that's a moot point; let's give RC the benefit of the doubt that it indeed was (or maybe he would have preferred it not being in focus ?? :bang:

If I was to take pictures in that situation, it would be pure luck that any picture would be in focus 😛

Stefan.

 

[Nigel Meaby]

"Capa was squeezing off photographs as he headed for a disabled American tank. He remembered feeling "a new kind of fear shaking my body from toe to hair, and twisting my face." With great difficulty his trembling hands reloaded his camera. All the while he repeated a sentence that he had picked up during the Spanish Civil War: "Es una cosa muy seria" ("This is a very serious business")."



"A darkroom technician was almost as anxious to see the invasion images as Capa himself. In his haste, the technician dried the film too quickly. The excess heat melted the emulsion on all but 10 of the frames. Those that remained were blurred, surreal shots, which succinctly conveyed the chaos and confusion of the day."

 

[Harry Lime]

The Robert Capa photograph above was not fuzzy and out of focus. It was produced by a freak processing accident. The films were processed with understandably some urgency but the guy who put the negs in the drying cabinet "cooked" the negs by having the temperature too high. Most of Capa's negs from the d-day landings were ruined but a few salvageable frames such as this one some could argue were actually enhanced by this accident making a far more evocative image of the d-day landings. This really does open up a whole new debate as the resulting image was created by a freak accident.

Yes and no.

Yes, the negatives were cooked in the drying cabinet, which obviously contributes to them looking the way they do.

But if you examine the other 10 D-Day shots you will notice that while they are full of motion blur, they are mostly in focus.

Capa was no gearhead, but in technical terms he was a very competent shooter. If you browse the Magnum archive you will noticed that the vast majority of his shots are in focus and properly exposed, even when people were shooting at him...

I think it's more an shutter speed problem in this case. The landings took place very early in the morning. It was overcast and maybe even raining. Capa took two Contax bodies to the beach and by the looks of his photos he was using a 50mm. He probably was shooting 100asa, which was just about the fastest film available in those days.

We are having a gloomy rainy day here today and metering on the balcony I get 1/30th @ f4 with the meter set to 100asa.

Even without the Wehrmacht shooting at you, you're going to end up with blurry pictures, if you're taking action shots with those settings.

 

[Harry Lime]

HCB would have used AF if it were an option during his time. [Didn't he use a Minilux?]

I doubt it. AF is great for many things, but not street photography. It's too slow. There are a few rare clips on Youtube of HCB shooting on the streets and there is no AF system on the planet that could work that fast. You'll notice the same if you watch the Winogrand videos. The only option for these guys was scale focusing.

And Sunny 16 or whatever variant he might have practiced just isn't appropriate for a photographer who has to satisfy an art director, or a client. HCB had the luxury of shooting long-term, semi-journalistic projects. If he came back with a contact sheet of unusable negs, no one would ever know, and his legacy would be untouched. He could spend three months in Central America and we would only see one image from that experience.

I don't know about that... Hundreds or thousands of journalists covered the news for decades without AF, but using Sunny 16. The vast majority of them managed to consistently produce shots that were in focus.

Also Winogrand and many other street shooters produced shots that were mostly in focus and all of them used Sunny 16 instead of AF.

I think the main problem was HCB himself. Brilliant composition, brilliant timing and some of the most sloppy technique ever seen.

Not only was HCB sloppy about his focusing, but also his exposure. I've read on many occasions that his printers cursed him vehemently, because some of his negatives were so poorly exposed that it would take hours to coaxe a useable print from them. This is pretty obvious if you have darkroom experience and look at some of his prints.

I guess it boils down to the fact that he really didn't care. Regardless of the fact that a lot of his work was technically substandard, he was hugely successful and therefore it wasn't an issue. What reason did he have to change his ways? Also can you imagine someone trying to discuss this issue with him? Even a close friend? HCB had an ego the size of the Eifel Tower. He was the epitome of the often lampooned French artist type and I can almost guarantee you that his response would have been vulcanic.

For me personally it isn't an issue. To me he still is one of the all time greats, in focus or not.

I'm going to stop now, lest i be attacked as an HCB "basher."

Feel free. I love his work, but I've seen kids in high school who were technically more proficient.