Karl and I were talking about how this blog about photography looked a little bare without some, you know, photography, when this fantastic glass plate negative came up in my google reader. (Probably in all your feed readers as well, unless you don’t subscribe to Shorpy’s RSS feed. And if you don’t, then good lord, man, why not?)
I’m always pleased and a little jealous when I see a portrait that definitively works without having eyes in sharp focus. In this case, the placement of the focus on the hands works perfectly. The properly grubby kid fingers are rendered sharply and feel utterly real and alive. The defocused gaze (both in terms of the lens and, I suspect, in terms of the girl’s eyes themselves not being focused on anything), in contrast, wanders somewhere in the middle distance, detached and slightly ethereal.
The plate appears to be in a non-ideal state of preservation — fingerprints, staining, etc. However, the halo of stains around the subject demonstrates that sometimes a little decay is just the thing…
