In 1900, a Chicago photographer named Henry G. Abbott published a slim technical manual on alternative printing methods. Buried in its preface is a remarkably prescient observation about human vision, artistic perception, and a debate that still rages in photography today — over a century later.

Abbott notes that painters of his era were openly hostile to photography, dismissing it as merely mechanical. But their specific criticism is what's fascinating. He writes:

They hold that a person viewing a landscape does not see all of it with equal distinctness, and that the prominent object or objects, whether situated in the foreground or middle foreground, must be more prominent than the balance of the picture, and that right here is one of the great faults of photography; that the lens sees all parts of the view with equal clearness or sharpness, and that this sharpness is the chief detriment when the picture is viewed from an artistic standpoint.

Read that again carefully. In 1900, painters were articulating something that neuroscience wouldn't formally describe until decades later: foveal vision. The human eye's retina has a tiny central region — the fovea — that sees in sharp detail, while peripheral vision is dramatically less resolved. When you look at a landscape, you don't actually see it all in focus. Your brain constructs an illusion of a complete, sharp scene by rapidly darting your gaze around. But at any given instant, only a small region is truly crisp. The painters knew this intuitively from studying their own perception. The camera, with its uniform sharpness across the frame, was producing something that looked wrong — not because it was inaccurate to the world, but because it was inaccurate to the experience of seeing.

Abbott describes how photographers responded to this critique by deliberately degrading their own images:

Certain workers have revised their methods of focusing and exposure, so as to make the results conform more closely to the tastes of the critics; but even then the results were not satisfactory, when ordinary printing-out papers, with extremely high finish, were employed in making the prints. Papers, then, which gave softer results, were looked for.

This drove photographers toward gum bichromate and platinotype printing — processes that produced soft, painterly images with muted detail. It was, in essence, the invention of the "artistic blur" as a deliberate photographic choice.

The irony for modern readers is staggering. Today, smartphone manufacturers spend billions engineering computational photography systems to produce images of ruthless sharpness — and then users immediately slap portrait mode on top, which uses depth estimation to artificially blur everything except the subject. Instagram filters soften skin. Cinema lenses costing tens of thousands of dollars are prized specifically for their smooth, creamy bokeh — their ability to render out-of-focus areas beautifully. TikTok creators shoot on vintage lenses precisely because they're less sharp than modern glass.

We have spent 126 years building sharper and sharper imaging technology, only to arrive at exactly the same conclusion those nineteenth-century painters reached: uniform sharpness looks mechanical and lifeless. The human eye doesn't work that way, and images that mimic human selective attention — sharp subject, soft surroundings — feel more natural and more emotionally resonant.

Abbott himself died in 1905 at just 47, but his little book captures a moment when artists and technologists were grappling with a fundamental truth about perception that we keep rediscovering and forgetting in every generation of imaging technology.