1210. Why do photographers often want to add blur in order to obscure undesirable areas of their pictures?

That is usually done so that viewers don’t give their attention to areas of the photograph the photographer doesn’t want them to look at.

Over the course of photographic history, the available depth of the area in focus was often less than the photographer wanted, especially when using larger film formats (countless photographers over the years craved more depth of field, not less).

But in recent years, photographers using small-sensor devices (such as smartphones) that inherently have much greater “depth of field” have often coveted the shallow depth-of-field look that larger-sensor (and larger film-format), more “professional” cameras inherently offer.

That desired “shallow depth-of-field” look partially explains the popularity of adding blur/bokeh to a photo after it is recorded.