Sharpness is a Bourgeois Concept

I’ve just returned from an intensive wet plate weekend in Warwick, and apart from the obvious pleasure of spending a couple of days immersed in a process that I love, it also reminded me of something that is perhaps rather more important than the chemistry, the glass, the silver bath or whether the plate has actually developed properly.

The Gate at Guys Cliffe

There is something enormously reassuring about being amongst people who understand why you do these things in the first place. To spend time with others who are equally fascinated by old photographic processes, who understand the frustrations as well as the rewards, and who don't look at you slightly strangely when you explain why you have spent half a day making one photograph, is good for the soul.

It also got me thinking about sharpness.

“Sharpness is a bourgeois concept.”

The remark is often attributed to Henri Cartier-Bresson, after he photographed Helmut Newton with his little Leica in Paris, 2000. Some of the images were apparently a little fuzzy. Newton was getting older, his hands perhaps not quite as steady as they once were, and his somewhat instinctive approach to photography meant that not everything emerged with the crispness we might traditionally expect.

Holly Reclined

Whether Cartier-Bresson actually intended the comment in quite the way it has subsequently been interpreted is another matter. But it is a wonderfully provocative statement, and one that I have often thought about in relation to my own approach to photography.

Sharpness undoubtedly has its place. There are genres where accurate recording is essential, where detail matters and where the expectation is that the photograph should faithfully describe what was in front of the camera. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But when photography moves towards the artistic, I'm not entirely convinced that technical accuracy should always be the objective.

Neston Park

We seem to have developed an almost obsessive relationship with sharpness. Cameras are capable of resolving extraordinary amounts of detail, lenses are judged by microscopic differences in resolution and photographers will quite happily spend a small fortune trying to make sure that every pixel is absolutely perfect.

But does the viewer really need to see every pixel?

Portraiture is an interesting example. I have heard the argument that a portrait must be sharp because we are trying to capture a likeness. And, of course, there is some truth in that. But a portrait is surely about rather more than the accurate rendering of someone's eyelashes. Sometimes it is the suggestion of a face, the softness of a feature or the quality of the light that tells us more about the person than clinical sharpness ever could.

Holly

Julia Margaret Cameron understood this rather wonderfully. Her photographs were often criticised for their lack of conventional sharpness, yet that softness became part of their emotional language. Her subjects are recognisable, but they aren't presented simply as specimens to be accurately recorded. There is atmosphere, emotion and something almost dreamlike about them.

And then there are photographers such as Olga Karlovac, who have taken the idea considerably further and made deliberate blur an integral part of their visual language. Her photographs don't apologise for being indistinct. The movement, uncertainty and lack of conventional clarity are the photographs.

I'm not quite that brave.

Perhaps I'm somewhere between the two. I still try to get my focus right. I still want my images to have definition and structure. But I've also reached a point where, if something is just a little bit off, I don't necessarily feel the need to discard it.

Wet plate collodion has probably helped me arrive at that conclusion. The process has a wonderful habit of reminding you that photography isn't always entirely under your control. Dust appears. Coatings behave unexpectedly. Edges lift. Exposure isn't quite right. Development takes its own path. And occasionally, despite everything you've done, the plate simply decides that it has other ideas.

And perhaps that's not such a bad thing.

We spend an enormous amount of time trying to eliminate imperfections from our photographs, when sometimes those imperfections are precisely what give an image its character. The tiny flaw, the softness, the movement, the unevenness or the accident can become something that couldn't have been designed in advance.

Upper Lawn at Guys Cliffe

So perhaps sharpness isn't the enemy after all. Perhaps the real danger is believing that technical perfection and photographic perfection are the same thing.

They aren't.

I'll continue trying to be sharp with my focus, but I'm becoming rather more relaxed about being perfect. After all, you never quite know where a little imperfection might lead you.

And that, I think, is one of the reasons I keep coming back to wet plate.