“How Do You ‘Do’ Bokeh?” The Aesthetics of How-to Videos about Background Blur and Eroticized Women

Producers of online instructional videos about bokeh emphasize disks of light and out-of-focus backgrounds. They demonstrate how camera lenses and technical features can render bokeh, or unfocused areas. Photographic and video bokeh ordinarily appears away from the center of attention. The bokeh genre, in opposition to typical photography and video practices, foregrounds the peripheral and proposes aesthetics and ways of looking by seeing and not seeing objects. However, producers of online instructional videos about bokeh sometimes couple their sensual aestheticization of backgrounds to their stated attempts to satisfy viewers’ investments in filling foregrounds with images of objectified women. These producers emphasize unconventional aesthetics as a means of establishing their creative and technical expertise and obscuring their reproduction of traditional conceptions of women as viewable and controllable. Close textual analysis, literature on photography and transparency, and feminist considerations of representation allow me to consider the aesthetics and functions of this how-to form.

Slides and photographs. List.

Reprinted in part from the Annual reports of the State Department of Education.

Wave velocity method of depth determination for non-uniform short crested wave systems by aerial photography /

Mode of access: Internet.

Ground cameras and photo lab equipment.

Mode of access: Internet.

The American annual of photography.

Vols. 1-16 form no. 21, 24, 28, 33, 36, 40, 43, 47, 50, 53, 57-59, 61-63 of the Scoville photographic series.

Guide for the recovery of silver from used fixing solution and scrap film : handbook.

Cover title.

Photography for amateurs : a non-technical manual for the use of all /

Includes index.

Lantern slides: how to make and color them.

Copyrighted in 1894.

Theoretical investigation of optimum methods for preparing controlled mosaics from 9 x 18-inch format, long focal length photography.

"Contract no. DA-44-009 Eng-3364, Department of the Army Project no. 8-35-03-216.j"

An electronic framing camera for millimicrosecond photography.

"[Given at] Wescon Conference, Western Electronic Show and Convention, 19-22 August 1958."

Questioned document problems, the discovery and proof of the facts.

Bibliography: p. [541]-549.

Photographic review; a journal devoted to photography.

Frequency varies.

Nature neighbors, embracing birds, plants, animals, minerals, in natural colors by color photography;

"John James Audubon edition."

The silver sunbeam; a practical and theoretical textbook on sun drawing and photographic printing:

Mode of access: Internet.

Instruction in photography /

Printed in Great Britain.