This is Reading Photographs, a newsletter for those interested in remarkably mundane photographs and why the details, ideas, emotions, memories, connections and beliefs they arouse make them meaningful.
Noah Kalina recently wrote about an assignment he did in 2011 for General Electric where he took a mess of photos in their facilities around the world and then turned them over to GE’s team to use on their Instagram feed. This was in the early days of the ‘Gram and brands were beginning to realize its potential.
. . .in a way I might be indirectly responsible for the acceptance of this type of online commercialization.
I apologize.
Noah said he really enjoyed the shoots, loved the photos he took and the edits he provided. What he didn’t like was GE playing into what was then a fad on Instagram: applying filters to his photos.
Digital cameras are, themselves, a filter—each one reflects the technology and aesthetics of its time. A photo taken on an early 2000s digital camera, for instance, captures not only the subject but also the era's unique imperfections—grainy textures, soft focus, lower resolutions, and muted colors. These qualities are part of the photo’s authenticity, a snapshot of history shaped by the camera’s limitations.
Adding filters that emulate an old type of film erases that context, replacing the original look with a trendy (at the time), artificial aesthetic that distorts the photograph's integrity. To me, that defied what I thought the purpose of the job was, which was to document these factories in that particular moment in time.
I was equally guilty of applying filters to nearly all my photos when I started my Instagram account in 2011. All the cool kids were doing it! And I really did think it made the photos I took on my phone, which I viewed as “less than” the photos I took with “real” cameras, more interesting.
But I don’t want to talk about filters. I wanna talk about bokeh.
Per Nikon, bokeh. . .
. . .comes from the Japanese word boke (ボケ), which means "blur" or "haze", or boke-aji, the "blur quality." Bokeh is pronounced BOH-Kə or BOH-kay. . .
Bokeh is defined as “the effect of a soft out-of-focus background that you get when shooting a subject, using a fast lens, at the widest aperture, such as f/2.8 or wider.” Simply put, bokeh is the pleasing or aesthetic quality of out-of-focus blur in a photograph.
Bokeh as a photographic technique or effect has been around technically since the invention of photography but it’s only been since the development of incredibly “bright” or “fast” lenses and modern digital cameras with their extensive manual control options that it has become something sought for or used to define a photographer’s personal style.
It does take skill to capture bokeh. Having a fast lens with a wide aperture of f/2.8 or more is critical but you also need a steady hand (or tripod), patience and an eye for finding that right focal point in a shallow depth of field. There are many contexts where bokeh can do a lot to lift an image and make the subject standout, such as wedding portraiture.
But bokeh-drenched imagery was very on trend in the beginning of the new millennium. When I first got on Flickr back in the day, photos with bokeh were pervasive. They regularly could be seen among the most “interesting” images featured as part of Flickr’s “Explore” page. There were countless groups you could join to share your bokeh images used in a variety of contexts, from portraiture to posed action figures. It wasn’t uncommon to see someone comment that the bokeh in an image was “delicious,” “delectable” or “dreamy.” Some of these were truly engrossing images—nature shots of animals or plants with dewy bokeh sprinkled about or night scenes where they glimmer low in the background. But, from my perspective, so much more of it was pure window dressing or trying to show off equipment. Then there was the fact that there are editing tools that can mimic the effect (poorly and noticeably) and many folk were all too eager to use them.
People new to a scene tend to be very susceptible to trends and fads within that scene as they seek to “fit in.” And I was no different.
I actually still really like the one with the cherry blossoms. And the self-portrait, while…different…at least has me sharp and in focus. But I took so many more than these examples. And I was terrible at it. I did not have steady enough hands to capture the images I wanted while out on a photo walk and hated lugging around a tripod. Thus, many of my attempts were just mistakes.
And that led me to create my first photographic series. It was called “Construction of Memory” and it was framed around how out-of-focus imagery is dreamlike and reminded me of specific moments and feelings in the past. It paired images with some brief text about what it had reminded me of.
One of my favorites was the photo above of my cat Jasper (RIP) sitting on the sill of a window of my apartment watching birds outside.
I hung these photos in my own show at a very short-lived artist’s space in the town I was living at the time. Actually sold some of the prints. It was the one time I ever had that level of exposure with my photography.
I gradually moved away from trying to get that delicious bokeh and out-of-focus imagery. Rather, documentary and street photography—in focus and sharp—became my milieu. That was likely the most natural path for my photography to take due to my education and career as a journalist. This is not to say I don’t try to do artsy-fartsy kinds of images from time to time but they feel very forced, very contrived to me.
But trying to apply a fad to my way of seeing things leave me with an appreciation for when it’s done right, helped me begin to see how I could construct narrative around images and forced me to do the one thing that will make you get better as a photographer: take photos. Lots of them. Many of them bad. But I can still look back on them fondly as part of my growth.
Noah notes that the fad of using filters on Instagram has largely dissipated. The only ones I use now are more for color toning or to convert them to black-and-white.
In retrospect, those photo filters were an indication of that era, a mix of old and new. In a way, we can look back on this era with nostalgia on top of nostalgia.
Wait.
Are the photos with the filters more interesting than the original photos I made with just my camera?
Ohh. I get it now.