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., Film Criticism: vol. 40, no. 2, (dlps) 13761232.0040.206, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.13761232.0040.206, This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Please contact mpub-help@umich.edu to use this work in a way not covered by the license., This work is protected by copyright and may be linked to without seeking permission. Permission must be received for subsequent distribution in print or electronically. Please contact mpub-help@umich.edu for more information.