Haze

About

Haze softens: edges blur, colours pale and distance dissolves, so a picture seems seen through breath, smoke or damp air. Painters have produced it with glazes, washes and deliberate blurring. Leonardo da Vinci's sfumato, from the Italian for smoke, melts the contours of a face into shadow, and around 1900 the Japanese painters Yokoyama Taikan and Hishida Shunsō dropped outlines altogether in a manner critics mocked as mōrōtai, the ‘vague style’.

Photographers pursued the same effect. Pictorialists such as Edward Steichen used soft focus, gum printing and twilight, as in The Flatiron (1904), where the building looms through wet evening air. Later artists made blur a subject. Gerhard Richter drags a brush across wet paint so that his photo-based pictures slip out of focus, Hiroshi Sugimoto photographs famous buildings with the lens focused beyond infinity, and Min Byung-hun photographs fields and trees nearly erased by fog and snow.