A long time ago I brought a print I had spent hours slaving over to the man with whom I was studying at the time. Once corner of the poorly made negative had obliged me to do a burn in excess of 10 minutes -- major upper body pain. He looked at the print and prononced the corner in question too light. I started to protest about how hard I had work and then fell silent. He was right.
The lesson there for me was that it doesn't matter what was done to make a print. It only matters what it looks like. It strikes me as both silly and irrelevant to distinguish between a digital or analogue path to this print's soft focus. It should simply be judged on its merits -- or their lack.
I worked helping print the portfolios of Paul Strand years ago. Paul was the first "realist purist" in the mediums history -- or at least is recoreded as such. Before Strand pictorialism reined. After Strand, photography stopped making apologies and became itself in a meaningful way. Annnnnyway, I remember being a bit shocked to discover that his negatives were often seriously manipulated. His image of the little chapel in New Mexico had red die and lipstick painted into the shadows to hold them open. Etc. Purists of the era would have been outraged at these departures from his oft quoted ideals of the real but they never knew. And it didn't and doesn't matter. His prints were beautiful -- that's what matters.
Which brings me to the important issue about this print. It isn't technical -- its philosophical and emotional. When you blur the figure you are suggesting that taken as is, unaltered, its realities, HER reality, was somehow not enough. That's a place to start the conversation. Not how. Why.