There seems to be a real shortage of focus in photography. I don’t mean this in a small way either, I mean it in a big way.

When I talk about focus, I’m talking about the desire to communicate an idea in whatever way provided by the medium as well as the optical phenomenon.

While a lot of photographs of cityscapes, tattooed scantily clad models, and other net nerdery exist for the sole purpose of tickling the “wow, that’s pretty” center of your brain; the photos themselves don’t say anything. They act as loose documentation of an event. But mostly they catalog the moment between when the shutter was pressed and when it was released or to be even more exact the moment light slammed into a CCD chip or sliver of film.

To be clear, I have no problem with individual creating photosets of every lunch they eat or every crack in the sidewalk that reminds them of a major river. Nor for that matter do I have an issue with people that want to share every photograph that has ever come off of a SD card or strip of film. That’s totally cool by me too.

The folks I’m concerned with don’t even know who they are — and I mean that in a very literal sense. These people lack focus on what they want to say. There is no shame in that, but don’t hide from your insecurities and fear of self by wrapping yourself in the blanket of Art.

I find it strange how with major assists from digital tech we are able to create with a level of precision that human beings have never had access to, and yet what’s created says more about machines than it does about the human beings that created it. This is to be expected I suppose, with such large and powerful tools, they become difficult to wield in the hands of amatuers. It takes time, discipline, and patience to wrestle control back from the automatic hand of the machine to create a symbiosis or a technique that strikes a balance between the tool and the human being.

This takes Focus. Which in turn means having a clear goal. In photography this usually means “What’s this photo about?” Open your average issue of PDN or sort through flickr submissions based on “interestingness” and you’re greeted with people who’ve spent a lot of time editing photographs until either everything is so “correct” that the image becomes stale and boring OR kicked the saturation up so high (presumably attempting to emulate a more “professional”) that you’re eyes nearly bleed. Your senses are assaulted with so much technical gibberish that the image lacks purpose.

A lack of focus in the images themselves is also prominent. Often times photos seem to be taken with a lens set to autofocus (AF) — or in the case of so-called traditionalist photographers shooting film on cameras that for years professional photographers viewed as toys that created images filled with uncontrollable imperfections. I’m speaking of the Holga and the Lomography community as well as other third world camera manufacturers capitalizing on the first world’s desire to create art via the imperfect hands and craftsmanship of another culture.

This surge in focusless imagery has translated itself into a strange aesthetic. Often times confused with surrealism or abstraction; the process of photography has become more interesting to the amateur photographer. How a photograph was taken seems to be of greater importance than Why a photograph was taken or more important: Why do you want to know how a photo was taken? What is it about the image that you would like to emulate? What (and where) has the photo touched you?

So you get Images that are filled with the Cameras relationship to the subject, not to the Photographers. This has extended itself to how photographers handle cameras, no longer placing their eye to viewfinders to assure an accurate representation of their idea, instead allowing an algorithm to determine what the focus of an image is. There are practical purposes to AF, but most of them are about documentation — not Art. Unless of course the purpose of your Art is attempting to make a statement about the relationship between humans and machines perception; because that’s the only thing that I see. And in the case of the so called lo-fi photographers, loading 35mm stock into hacked Holgas, all you’re really telling me is that you’ve given away some of your responsibilities to a mechanical process, which is totally cool by me, as long as you can admit it.