Pictorialism is an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the later 19th and early 20th centuries. There is no standard definition of the term, but in general it refers to a style in which the photographer has somehow manipulated what would otherwise be a straightforward photograph as a means of creating an image rather than simply recording it. Typically, a pictorial photograph appears to lack a sharp focus (some more so than others), is printed in one or more colors other than black-and-white (ranging from warm brown to deep blue) and may have visible brush strokes or other manipulation of the surface. For the pictorialist, a photograph, like a painting, drawing or engraving, was a way of projecting an emotional intent into the viewer's realm of imagination.
Pictorialism as a movement thrived from about 1885 to 1915, although it was still being promoted by some as late as the 1940s. It began in response to claims that a photograph was nothing more than a simple record of reality, and transformed into a movement to advance the status of all photography as a true art form. For more than three decades painters, photographers and art critics debated opposing artistic philosophies, ultimately culminating in the acquisition of photographs by several major art museums.
Pictorialism gradually declined in popularity after 1920, although it did not fade out of popularity until the end of World War II. During this period the new style of photographic Modernism came into vogue, and the public's interest shifted to more sharply focused images such as seen in the work of Ansel Adams. Several important 20th-century photographers began their careers in a pictorialist style but transitioned into sharply focused photography by the 1930s.
These debates reached their peak during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, culminating in the creation of a movement that is usually characterized as a particular style of photography: pictorialism. This style is defined first by a distinctly personal expression that emphasizes photography's ability to create visual beauty rather than simply record facts. However, recently historians have recognized that pictorialism is more than just a visual style. It evolved in direct context with the changing social and cultural attitudes of the time, and, as such, it should not be characterized simply as a visual trend. One writer has noted that pictorialism was "simultaneously a movement, a philosophy, an aesthetic and a style."
Contrary to what some histories of photography portray, pictorialism did not come about as the result of a linear evolution of artistic sensibilities; rather, it was formed through "an intricate, divergent, often passionately conflicting barrage of strategies." While photographers and others debated whether photography could be art, the advent of photography directly affected the roles and livelihoods of many traditional artists. Prior to the development of photography, a painted miniature portrait was the most common means of recording a person's likeness. Thousands of painters were engaged in this art form. But photography quickly negated the need for and interest in miniature portraits. One example of this effect was seen at the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy in London; in 1830 more than 300 miniature paintings were exhibited, but by 1870 only 33 were on display. Photography had taken over for one type of art form, but the question of whether photography itself could be artistic had not been resolved.
Some painters soon adopted photography as a tool to help them record a model's pose, a landscape scene or other elements to include in their art. It is known that many of the great 19th-century painters, including Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, Manet, Degas, Cézanne, and Gauguin, took photographs themselves, used photographs by others and incorporated images from photographs into their work. While heated debates about the relationship between photography and art continued in print and in lecture halls, the distinction between a photographic image and a painting became more and more difficult to discern. As photography continued to develop, the interactions between painting and photography became increasingly reciprocal. More than a few pictorial photographers, including Alvin Langdon Coburn, Edward Steichen, Gertrude Käsebier, Oscar Gustave Rejlander, and Sarah Choate Sears, were originally trained as painters or took up painting in addition to their photographic skills.
It was during this same period that cultures and societies around the world were being affected by a rapid increase in intercontinental travel and commerce. Books and magazines published on one continent could be exported and sold on another with increasing ease, and the development of reliable mail services facilitated individual exchanges of ideas, techniques and, most importantly for photography, actual prints. These developments led to pictorialism being "a more international movement in photography than almost any other photographic genre." Camera clubs in the U.S., England, France, Germany, Austria, Japan and other countries regularly lent works to each other's exhibitions, exchanged technical information and published essays and critical commentaries in one another's journals. Led by The Linked Ring in England, the Photo-Secession in the U.S., and the Photo-club de Paris in France, first hundreds and then thousands of photographers passionately pursued common interests in this multi-dimensional movement. Within the span of little more than a decade, notable pictorial photographers were found in Western and Eastern Europe, North America, Asia and Australia.
All of that changed in a few years' time span. In 1888 George Eastman introduced the first handheld amateur camera, the Kodak camera. It was marketed with the slogan "You press the button, we do the rest." The camera was pre-loaded with a roll of film that produced about 100 2.5" round picture exposures, and it could easily be carried and handheld during its operation. After all of the shots on the film were exposed, the whole camera was returned to the Kodak company in Rochester, New York, where the film was developed, prints were made, and new photographic film was placed inside. Then the camera and prints were returned to the customer, who was ready to take more pictures.
The impact of this change was enormous. Suddenly almost anyone could take a photograph, and within the span of a few years photography became one of the biggest in the world. Photography collector Michael G. Wilson observed "Thousands of commercial photographers and a hundred times as many amateurs were producing millions of photographs annually ... The decline in the quality of professional work and the deluge of snapshots (a term borrowed from hunting, meaning to get off a quick shot without taking the time to aim) resulted in a world awash with technically good but aesthetically indifferent photographs."
Concurrent with this change was the development of national and international commercial enterprises to meet the new demand for cameras, films and prints. At the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which attracted more than 27 million people, photography for amateurs was marketed at an unprecedented scale. There were multiple large exhibits displaying photographs from around the world, many camera and darkroom equipment manufacturers showing and selling their latest goods, dozens of portrait studios and even on-the-spot documentation of the Exposition itself. Suddenly photography and photographers were household commodities.
Many serious photographers were appalled. Their craft, and to some their art, was being co-opted by a newly engaged, uncontrolled and mostly untalented citizenry. The debate about art and photography intensified around the argument that if anyone could take a photograph then photography could not possibly be called art. Some of the most passionate defenders of photography as art pointed out that photography should not and cannot be seen as an "either/or" medium—some photographs are indeed simple records of reality, but with the right elements some are indeed works of art. William Howe Downs, art critic for the Boston Evening Transcript, summed up this position in 1900 by saying "Art is not so much a matter of methods and processes as it is an affair of temperament, of taste and of sentiment ... In the hands of the artist, the photograph becomes a work of art ... In a word, photography is what the photographer makes it ‒ an art or a trade."
All of these elements—the debates over photography and art, the impacts of Kodak cameras, and the changing social and cultural values of the times—combined to set the stage for an evolution in how art and photography, independently and together, would appear at the turn of the century. The course that drove pictorialism was set almost as soon as photographic processes were established, but it was not until the last decade of the 19th century that an international pictorialist movement came together.
Other photographers and art critics, including Oscar Rejlander, Marcus Aurelius Root, and John Ruskin, echoed these ideas. One of the primary forces behind the rise of pictorialism was the belief that straight photography was purely representational ‒ that it showed reality without the filter of artistic interpretation. It was, for all intents and purposes, a simple record of the visual facts, lacking artistic intent or merit. Robinson and others felt strongly that the "usually accepted limitations of photography had to be overcome if an equality of status was to be achieved."
Robert Demachy later summarized this concept in an article entitled "What Difference Is There Between a Good Photograph and an Artistic Photograph?". He wrote "We must realize that, on undertaking pictorial photography, we have, unwittingly perhaps, bound ourselves to the strict observance of rules hundreds of years more ancient than the oldest formulae of our chemical craft. We have slipped into the Temple of Art by a back door, and found ourselves amongst the crowd of adepts."
One of the challenges in promoting photography as art was that there were many different opinions about how art should look. After the Third Philadelphia Salon 1900, which showcased dozens of pictorial photographers, one critic wondered "whether the idea of art in anything like the true sense had ever been heard or thought by the great majority of exhibitors."
While some photographers saw themselves becoming true artists by emulating painting, at least one school of painting directly inspired photographers. During the 1880s, when debates over art and photography were becoming commonplace, a style of painting known as Tonalism first appeared. Within a few years it became a significant artistic influence on the development of pictorialism. Painters such as James McNeill Whistler, George Inness, Ralph Albert Blakelock, and Arnold Böcklin saw the interpretation of the experience of nature, as contrasted with simply recording an image of nature, as the artist's highest duty. To these artists it was essential that their paintings convey an emotional response to the viewer, which was elicited through an emphasis on the atmospheric elements in the picture and by the use of "vague shapes and subdued tonalities ... to a sense of elegiac melancholy."
Applying this same sensibility to photography, Alfred Stieglitz later stated it this way: "Atmosphere is the medium through which we see all things. In order, therefore, to see them in their true value on a photograph, as we do in Nature, atmosphere must be there. Atmosphere softens all lines; it graduates the transition from light to shade; it is essential to the reproduction of the sense of distance. That dimness of outline which is characteristic for distant objects is due to atmosphere. Now, what atmosphere is to Nature, tone is to a picture."
Paul Lewis Anderson, a prolific contemporary promoter of pictorialism, advised his readers that true art photography conveyed "suggestion and mystery", in which "mystery consists in affording an opportunity for the exercise of the imagination, whereas suggestion involves stimulating the imagination by direct or indirect means." Science, pictorialists contended, might answer a demand for truthful information, but art must respond to the human need for stimulation of the senses. This could only be done by creating a mark of individuality for each image and, ideally, each print.
For pictorialists, true individuality was expressed through the creation of a unique print, considered by many to be the epitome of artistic photography. By manipulating the appearance of images through what some called "ennobling processes", such as gum bichromate or bromoil printing, pictorialists were able to create unique photographs that were sometimes mistaken for drawings or Lithography.
Many of the strongest voices that championed pictorialism at its beginning were a new generation of amateur photographers. In contrast to its meaning today, the word "amateur" held a different connotation in the discussions of that time. Rather than suggesting an inexperienced novice, the word characterized someone who strived for artistic excellence and a freedom from rigid academic influence. An amateur was seen as someone who could break the rules because he or she was not bound by the then rigid rules set forth by long-established photography organizations like the Royal Photographic Society. An article in the British journal Amateur Photographer stated "photography is an art ‒ perhaps the only one in which the amateur soon equals, and frequently excels, the professional in proficiency." This attitude prevailed in many countries around the world. At the 1893 Hamburg International Photographic Exhibition in Germany, only the work of amateurs was allowed. Alfred Lichtwark, then director of the Kunsthalle Hamburg believed "the only good portraiture in any medium was being done by amateurs photographers, who had the economic freedom and time to experiment."
In 1948, S.D.Jouhar defined a Pictorial photograph as "mainly an aesthetic symbolic record of a scene plus the artist's personal comment and interpretation, capable of transmitting an emotional response to the mind of a receptive spectator. It should show originality, imagination, unity of purpose, a quality of repose, and have an infinite quality about it."
A culminating moment for pictorialism and for photography in general occurred in 1910, when the Albright Gallery in Buffalo bought 15 photographs from Stieglitz' 291 Gallery. This was the first time photography was officially recognized as an art form worthy of a museum collection, and it signaled a definite shift in many photographers' thinking. Stieglitz, who had worked so long for this moment, responded by indicating he was already thinking of a new vision beyond pictorialism. He wrote,
Soon after Stieglitz began to direct his attention more to modern painting and sculpture, and Clarence H. White and others took over the leadership of a new generation of photographers. As the harsh realities of World War I affected people around the world, the public's taste for the art of the past began to change. Developed countries of the world focused more and more on industry and growth, and art reflected this change by featuring hard-edged images of new buildings, airplanes and industrial landscapes.
, a 20th-century photographer who continued to make pictorial photographs well into the 1960s, believed that pictorialism is eternal because it is based upon beauty first. He wrote "There is no solution in trying to eradicate pictorialism for one would then have to destroy idealism, sentiment and all sense of art and beauty. There will always be pictorialism."
As in other countries, opposing viewpoints engaged a wider range of photographers in defining what pictorialism meant. Hans Watzek, Hugo Henneberg and Heinrich Kühn formed an organization called Das Kleeblatt (The Trilfolium) expressly to increase the exchange of information with other organizations in other countries, especially, France, Germany and the United States. Initially a small, informal group, Das Kleeblatt increased it influence in the Wiener Camera-Klub through its international connections, and several other organizations promoting pictorialism were created in other cities throughout the region. As in other countries, interest in pictorialism faded after World War I, and eventually most of the Austrian organization slipped into obscurity during the 1920s.
After The Linked Ring invited a select group of Americans as members, debates broke out about the goals and purpose of the club. When more American than British members were shown at their annual exhibit in 1908, a motion was introduced to disband the organization. By 1910 The Linked Ring has dissolved, and its members went their own way.
In 1904 a new magazine called Shashin Geppo ( Monthly Photo Journal) was started, and for many years it was the centerpiece for the advancement of and debates about pictorialism. The meaning and direction of art photography as championed by Ogawa and others was challenged in the new journal by photographers Tarō Saitō and Haruki Egashira, who, along with Tetsusuke Akiyama and Seiichi Katō, formed a new group known as Yūtsuzu-sha. This new group promoted their own concepts of what they called "the inner truth" of art photography. For the next decade many photographers aligned themselves with one of these two organizations.
In the 1920s new organizations were formed that bridged the transition between pictorialism and modernism. Most prominently among these was the Shashin Geijustu-sha (Photographic Art Society) formed by Shinzō Fukuhara and his brother Rosō Fukuhara. They promoted the concept of hikari to sono kaichō (light with its harmony) that rejected an overt manipulation of an image in favor of soft-focused images using silver gelatin printing.
While much initially centered on Stieglitz, pictorialism in the U.S. was not limited to New York. In Boston F. Holland Day was one of the most prolific and noted pictorialists of his time. Clarence H. White, who produced extraordinary pictorial photographs while in Ohio, went on to teach a whole new generation of photographers. On the West Coast the California Camera Club and Southern California Camera Club included prominent pictorialists Annie Brigman, Arnold Genthe, Adelaide Hanscom Leeson, Emily Pitchford and William Edward Dassonville. Later on, the Seattle Camera Club was started by a group of Japanese-American pictorialists, including Dr. Kyo Koike, Frank Kunishige and Iwao Matsushita (prominent members later included Ella E. McBride and Soichi Sunami).
Defining pictorialism
Gallery
Transition into Modernism
It is high time that the stupidity and sham in pictorial photography be struck a solarplexus blow ... Claims of art won't do. Let the photographer make a perfect photograph. And if he happens to be a lover of perfection and a seer, the resulting photograph will be straight and beautiful – a true photograph.
Pictorialism by country
Australia
Austria
Canada
England
France
Germany
Japan
Netherlands
Russia
Spain
United States
Techniques
Pictorial photographers
Photographers who were predominantly pictorialists
20th-century photographers who began as pictorialists
Further reading
See Also
Notes
Sources
Further reading
External links
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