Pictorialism (movement)

Pictorialism is a movement in photography that embraces aesthetics, composition, and tonality. It is an artistic rather than a documentary approach to photography. Within the movement, some photographers disdained manipulation of the images, such as layering several negatives to create one photo.

Pictorialism arose during the 1860s and remained influential into the early twentieth century. The movement gets its name from Pictorial Effect in Photography, an 1869 book by English photographer Henry Peach Robinson, who also had found early success as a painter. The photographic movement arose at the same time the impressionist painters were growing in influence.

Proponents of the movement saw themselves as artists. While many visual artists used tools such as paintbrushes and pencils, pictorialist artists used the camera and often the processing equipment. They further differentiated themselves from other photographers after 1888, when handheld cameras became more common and photography grew as a popular hobby. The distinction as pictorialists saw it was between someone who pointed a camera and shot a picture, and an artist who composed an image, hand printed it, and in many cases used other techniques to realize a vision.

Background

Photography was born out of both art and science. It began with a device called the camera obscura, which has been in use since at least the tenth century. It uses a pinhole in a window blind to cast an upside-down version of a scene on a surface. A seventeenth-century refinement of the camera obscura, which contained the device in a box with an adjustable lens, made it convenient to transport, and it was widely used by draftsmen and artists working in the field who wanted to make quick sketches of a scene.

Nineteenth-century printmaker and painter Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was fascinated by the camera obscura and wanted to create permanent images. He worked on the problem with Nicéphore Niépce from 1829 until the latter's death in 1833, using light and chemistry. Daguerre continued to experiment alone and in 1838 was able to produce images on silver-plated sheets of copper. He called these images daguerreotypes and showed them to both artists and scientists. Daguerre explained the process in 1839 to an overflow crowd at a joint session of the Académies des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts. To create the image on a polished silver-plated copper sheet, one had to expose the sheet to iodine vapors, put it in a box camera to expose it, and develop it with mercury fumes. Then the image was stabilized using either salt water or sodium thiosulphate.

Scientists found many uses for photography. Among the first mentions was an image of a magnified spider, which allowed the viewer to study it in minute detail. Astronomers quickly began photographing the moon and other celestial objects.

Daguerre's photographic examples, created for his demonstration, included plaster casts of ancient sculptures and still-life images of shells and fossils. These images indicated the artistic potential of photography.

Early camera boxes were large and expensive. The process of developing the images was difficult. For several decades, only scientists and people with the means to indulge in photography were taking pictures. Some used photography to document; others were more interested in creating art. Then in 1888, Kodak introduced the first simple box camera. It marketed the product as so simple, even a child could take photographs. The user mailed the entire camera to Kodak, which removed and processed the film, and returned the reloaded camera to the customer, ready to use. The prints were delivered soon after in the mail. Documentation of everyday events—birthdays, new babies, family gatherings, and trips—by average people of modest means began in earnest. To those with an artistic interest in photography, this commonplace use of the camera was a foreign concept. Many worked hard to distance themselves, and their work, from the everyday hobbyist.

Overview

Henry Peach Robinson was a painter during the 1840s and 1850s. He was more interested in photography, however, and opened a commercial photo studio in 1857. His skills and education as a painter influenced his personal photographs. He composed photos in keeping with the trends and themes of the day and employed models for many of his images. He used multiple negatives to create the composite image Juliet with the Poison Bottle in 1857. The following year, Fading Away, an image depicting the death of a young girl, generated a furor because the public thought the subject matter was too painful for photographic depiction. The notoriety drew attention to his pictorialist movement, and after several more exhibitions, he published the handbook Pictorial Effect in Photography. Many photographers took up the idea, and the movement grew.

In 1892, Robinson was a founding member of the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, an association of English fine art photographers. The Linked Ring organized annual salons, much as painters had done for some time, to exhibit photographic works of artistic merit. These salons took place from 1893 to 1909.

The Linked Ring accepted many internationally renowned photographers as members, including Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, and Clarence H. White. These four, along with Alvin Langdon Coburn, went on to form an American association, Photo-Secession, in 1902. A number of photographers in the United States were already creating and exhibiting pictorial photography, and some joined the Photo-Secession. Photographers in Austria, France, and other countries also established associations to promote the artistic development of photography.

The Photo-Secession, based in New York City, was highly successful for several years. The members established the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue—the gallery was known simply as 291—to show their work. Stieglitz edited a quarterly magazine of pictorialism, Camera Work. The association's 1910 international exhibition included more than five hundred photographs. The group began to dissolve that same year due to differences in their approaches to pictorialism, however, and Stieglitz wrapped up both Camera Work and the Photo-Secession in 1917. While negative and print manipulation was the hallmark of the movement under Robinson, American photographers were divided. Some, including Stieglitz, advocated for what they called straight photography, meaning the photographer's work was done primarily before he or she pressed the shutter through composition, point of view, exposure time, and depth of field. They believed manipulation during processing and printing had a detrimental effect on the images. In 1916, Coburn, Käsebier, and White formed the Pictorial Photographers of America, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2016.

Pictorialism as a movement ended soon after World War I (1914–1918). In the face of rapid social change, it was eclipsed by modernism.

Bibliography

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Tisa, Benedict. "Pictorialists' Movement Brought New 'Reality' to Their Art." Chicago Tribune, 27 June 1986, articles.chicagotribune.com/1986-06-27/entertainment/8602160033‗1‗pictorial-style-portable-camera-processing-and-printing. Accessed 13 Apr. 2017.