I agree that several people do abuse blur and they misuse the term bokeh for it. You weren't blunt to an effect though, you were just inaccurate in your wording, shotgunning professional journalists/wedding photographers/fashion photographers/commercial photographers/etc, etc. and amateurs alike although your intent was to snipe at the beginners who tastelessly refer to bokeh and abuse it. There are good uses for subject separation, but you didn't exactly account for those exceptions.
Photography traces its roots to practices that predate it. Talbot and Daguerre (do you remember them?) did not invent the portrait, so painting techniques do apply to photographs. Impressionism would be the style for which you deem excessive blur, Hollywood style lighting for the backlit hair. Is it overdone, perhaps? Does this make it a better or worse photo? I think that really depends on the particular photo and the particular photographer. The styles by Liebowitz and McCurry are Liebowitz's and McCurry's style. Aping them is your choice. They are just one of many styles of several great artists out there that you and I may or may not have been exposed to. Fame and popularity are not necessarily measures for great works of art. I believe McCurry is a great artist, but not because other people do so, but because I like his style and his approach.
Capturing as-is is realism, dating back to Henry Talbot's invention of the paper emulsion print as well as other infant developments in photography and paintings from the Renaissance and other eras as well as ultraviolence in Sam Pekinpah's The Wild Bunch; Robert J Flaherty's Nanook of the North is an early documentary trying to put on an appearance of realism; Marco Polo's travels of China the same. Photojournalistic is natural light like most of McCurry's photos and human interaction between subject and photographer. Invisible strobe lighting that appears natural is another. Rembrandt lighting another (that is NOT a photographic technique). Liebowitz tries to be fine-art, but she's mostly commercial in nature. A photographer I know for the University of California system and a lot of other Eastern European, Nordic, French and Russian ones are fine-art. These are genres or techniques to group the photographers. However, you seem obsessed with a few photographers and suggest that their way is the correct way. I like McCurry. I don't try to copy him, but I do try to take pointers from his style. I don't think his style or Liebowitz's style invalidates what other great photographers do. Rules are meant to be broken or adhered to per assignment. If we were all Liebowitz's or McCurry's, they would not be special people, would they? Taste should not necessarily dictate conformity.
So basically, photography is just one of a few recent developments in media studies that long predate you or I. Without artistic training or context, photography and movie-making is just relegated to Talbot's original vision: reproduction devices. If you couldn't care for historical context within media production, then you limit yourself to aping instead of understanding light, or at the very least, you limit your scope and your ability to articulate your taste.
So again, I agree with you on the taste, not so much the argument by popularity. Art is finite and temporary and always changing, despite what you think, and decades and eras change what public taste will dictate. Trends and other people's opinions are not necessarily good reason that justifies a taste, depending on the time-period involved. An oil tycoon that decides harsh California light (at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles) or that molds of human genitalia using carcinogenic polyurethane that kills the artist (at Hammer Museum in Westwood Village) or the modern smear at Museum of Contemporary Art in Downtown LA generally motivates museum-goers to ooh and aah and agree that what is presented is good art because of its venue and presentation. Popularity among visitors, same as popularity within the country or world does not necessarily make something good art. Trends pass, etc. McCurry is good, but not because he is popular or cited or published, but because of his eye for light and composition, his repertoire with his subject, all skills that derive from media and artists predating photography.
Yes, I started out a little blunt--I tried to speak my mind, maybe in a abrasive manner. But this post wasn't meant to be nice to people. It was meant to be accusational to some degree. I am indeed saying that some people "don't get it"--mostly due to how so many threads one lenses are about generating blur (... though they use the word "bokeh") and that based on what I said in this thread, massive blur most of the time does not get you the most meaningful pictures (apparently arguable.)
So then, ... you mentioned some other "art" (I'm not sure if you meant photographs?). But I would appreciate very much if someone did prove me wrong by showing a genre of photography where the images are famous enough that a significant population on this forum will recognize them, where non-subject areas are heavily blurred on a regular basis.
Now, I have a huge book of Leibowitz's pictures and the are several near the end that are blurred, but completely, and probably by a combination of hand shake and being out of focus. That's not really what I meant because that's a very small subset of her work. I just call it her filler. (They're meaningless pictures to me.) I mean where blur is a major component of a genre.
I think if such a genre can be identified, then there could be a good discussion to be had.
