In 1889 Peter Henry Emerson, an advocate of art photography inflected by science, argued that in order to accurately simulate human vision, a photographer should leave his lens slightly unfocussed since the focus of the eye naturally blurs at its periphery. Although Emerson’s theory was widely debated and by 1891 he, too, refuted its accuracy, soft focus as a marker of the pictorial in photography continued to proliferate into the beginning of the 20th Century. While significant curatorial attention has been paid in recent years to the abundance of contemporary photographers who have returned to antique processes, much less been made of contemporary practitioners whose work celebrates the pictorial conventions, like the soft focus aesthetic, employed by many early photographers.

Robert Stivers, Inga Dorosz, and Sean Higgins are three contemporary Western, or West Coast-based, photographers who employ a form of abstraction through soft focus, to their own diverse ends. Taken together, their work does not constitute a trend, however, so much as a broadly shared approach to the medium of photography, and, perhaps, a reaction against the increased prevalence and ostensible precision of digital imagery in today’s visual environment. Robert Stivers, based in Santa Fe, has been mining his particular vein of photographic abstraction for almost a decade, though it wasn’t until several years into his exploration that a coherent body of work emerged. He recalls, “I started making these as a period of meditation between other bodies of work. It began as an exploration just to clear the mind, like cleansing the palette.”

Stivers applies extreme darkroom manipulation, including chemical washes and softly focusing the enlarger lens, to a host of different subjects, from landscapes, to still-lifes, and even portraits. His latest work, some of which published in an elegant volume called Sanctum by Twin Palms Press and which was exhibited at Frank Pictures Gallery, Santa Monica, combines all of these subjects united by the rich visual texture of Stivers’ prints. The out-of-focus quality and unusually somber tones combine to create an aura of ghostliness and mystery which are particularly evident in an image of a standing nude who appears to levitate in a cloud of smoke like an occult photograph.

The signature image of Stivers’ previous series, Sestina, likewise carries more than a hint of haunting. The broken scrollwork of a gilded Baroque mirror signifies decadence in equal measure with decay. Despite its frontal positioning, no shape is visible in the scratched glass of the mirror.

Stivers, who received his MA from NYU in 1980, began his creative career as professional dancer and choreographer, though as a result of injury he has turned increasingly towards photography in recent years. Still, his photographic process echoes something of his work on the dance floor. He says, “A lot of dance that I like is almost improvisational. Basically it’s about having a sense of technique and a history with dance; I have a vocabulary and knowledge of how dance works. Then I’m free to go and play with it. From that sense of play and exploration I can choreograph a short piece that becomes a whole. I think that’s a really good analogy for my photography. I have a base and a knowledge of working in the darkroom. With that, I’m allowed to use the chemistry to create or choreograph a photographic body of work.”

Inga Dorosz plays with similar aesthetic conventions to impart a sense of history to her work. Dorosz, based in San Francisco, uses soft and selective focus to echo the photographic travelogues of 19th century explorers that are her inspiration. As she notes, much of her work is about “looking through someone else’s eyes,” and the nature of her source material lends a markedly subjective quality to her finished work. Many of the 19th century images she consulted express a sense of awe and diminution of the human subject in the face of an unforgiving landscape like the Antarctic.

Dorosz describes the glass-plate negatives that she studies as having “a quality of infinite detail and depth.” She continues, “There’s a sense that you can’t even see scale and that’s something that I’m really interested in. In places like Antarctica, it’s hard to tell whether you’re looking at one glacier or at a mountain range.” The images from her Seascapes series, on view this fall at Sam Lee Gallery in Los Angeles, capitalize on this perceptual confusion. Dorosz, who received her MFA in sculpture from Stanford in 2001, made tabletop dioramas of crumpled sheets of foil against dark backgrounds. The sparsely lit photographs of these scenes are deeply foreboding and strongly evocative of the writing of Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville, whose work Dorosz also consulted for the project. Only an inkling of light illuminates the scene and the jumbled forms easily take on the aspect of a violent ocean storm at night, the plane of darkness broken only by white caps.

The Seascapes, as a function of their photographic process, lay claim to reality in a way that her recent series of drawings do not. The nine-foot long scroll drawings which will be on view at Michael Rosenthal Gallery in San Francisco, from February 7 through March 4, 2009, impose even greater limits on the translation of space from a three to two-dimensional plane. Dorosz has her restricted her mark-making to a series of short lines that convey only an essence of the landscape. The pen and ink dashes and dots are not just visually reminiscent of Morse code; in fact, Dorosz has integrated text into her landscapes, including W.H. Auden’s poem, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” in which Auden describes the soul of Yeats’ work dissipating among the villages of Ireland wracked by the ongoing war.

Disparate though they may seem, both these bodies of work by Dorosz question the veracity and even the possibility of representation. Whereas Emerson advocated the use of soft-focus in the 1880s as a means to more accurately reflect the experience of human vision, the photograph today seems to express its truth as a function of its medium alone. Dorosz complicates this expectation through her use of photography to represent a view that is decidedly not a real landscape, though it bears the markers of photographic reality.

Sean Higgins’ work also explores the tenuous connection of the photograph to reality which is imbued with a powerful sense of nostalgia. Higgins began exploring the rich connotative aspects of found photographs as an escape from the urban landscape of Los Angeles where he moved after completing his MFA at the University of Pennsylvania in 1998. Higgins describes his elaborate process of laying sheets of sanded Plexiglas over the prints in his series Island of Relative Stability as a means of hiding something from the viewer, forcing the viewer to experience the image from a distance. The Plexiglas also gives the images a uniformly soft-focus. Aiming for an image that was suggestive of memory or a dream state he says, “I think the medium [sanded Plexiglas over photographs] is appropriate to implying something that fades into the past, or some partially-formed, imagined place.”

The imagined places in Island of Relative Stability are of two sorts: either cold, glacial blue peaks or green islands adrift in empty white seas. The Plexiglas imparts on all these scenes a literal sense of frost or fog, but coupled with the worked surface of the prints they appear also to be rising from the mist of memory. The most powerful images, some as large as 60 inches square, appear to have been folded and softened by countless viewings. His latest body of work, Apocrypha, which was on view this fall at OKOK Gallery in Seattle, draws on images of roiling smoke and steam culled from NASA image archives and although the final images look very different, Higgins insists that they inspire similar responses from viewers as a result of their photographic source material. “Part of what’s great about making something that’s believable in the end is that people don’t question it. I do get a lot of questions about where the places are and then I have to explain that these aren’t real places, that they are fabrications or fictional places.” Higgins’ work draws significantly on the privileged relationship of photography to the real. Like Dorosz’s seascapes or recreated expedition photographs, Higgins creates scenes that are in some ways easier to access than real photographs. As he says, “In all of my work I try to give you something to look at where you can go in and make up your own interpretation or story as to what’s happening in the image.”

Responding to such diverse materials as early American paintings, 19th Century travelogues, and contemporary space exploration, these three artists are all working with great success at the limits of photographic abstraction. By building on historically specific modes of image-making, Stivers, Dorosz, and Higgins each graft something new and vital onto the living history of photography.

“Mistakes were Made,” 2008, Sean Higgins, Unique archival inkjet, 36" x 36"
Photo: courtesy of Sean Higgins and OKOK Gallery, Seattle