Great article on Alvin Langdon Coburn on The Online Photographer. It’s nice to see someone who doesn’t dismiss pictorialism out of hand.
Alvin Langdon Coburn, if you don’t know the name, born 1882, was a pictorialist enfant terrible (nevertheless dominated by his strong-willed mother) who did his best work before the First World War—he gained substantial fame and reputation while still in his teens and twenties. But speaking of sharpness, it was pretty amusing to see Coburn’s strongly pictorialist photographic style in light of today’s torrid discussions of resolution and sharpness. Everyone who was anyone in his day considered an impressionistic unsharpness to be the mark of artistic interpretation, and photographers across the Western world prized “diffusion.” The public now, not knowing any better, thinks that old lenses from around the turn of the 20th century were not sharp because the technology simply hadn’t progressed far enough. Not so. Lensmakers vied with each other to make lenses deliberately designed to be unsharp, first for portraits, then for everything. Photographers went to great lengths to seek out lenses with just the proper degree and type of blurriness. And, at clubs and salons and in photographic journals, they argued about just which lenses were the most perfectly unsharp. (I know it appears that I’m kidding, but I am not.) I recall reading about one photographer who kept the identity of his prized portrait lens a secret so his competitors would find it harder to mimic him.
I particularly liked this bit:
Lensmakers vied with each other to make lenses deliberately designed to be unsharp, first for portraits, then for everything. Photographers went to great lengths to seek out lenses with just the proper degree and type of blurriness. And, at clubs and salons and in photographic journals, they argued about just which lenses were the most perfectly unsharp.
I recently posted a picture of my friend Andres and in it I bemoaned the fact that it wasn’t very sharp (because of my ineptitude in letting the shutter speed get too low). It’s good to see that there were once photographers who valued less than sharp images. So in a salute to Alvin Langdon Coburn I’ve reworked my picture of Andres to give it more of a pictorialist feel (see below).
