People have been asking this question about photography since the medium's discovery one hundred and seventy years ago.
After the introduction of the first amateur camera by Kodak (in 1888), the ease and novelty of capturing images was beginning to fade. Many were now questioning whether the camera was in fact too accurate and detailed. This, in addition to the fact that painting enjoyed a much higher status than this new mechanical process, caused some photographers to look for new techniques that, as they saw it, could make photography more of an art form.
In the late 1800s, a group of photographers, who eventually became known as Pictorialists, sought to differentiate their artistic work from amateurs' snapshots.
They ascribed to a style of photography where the actual scene shown was of less importance than the artistic quality of the image. For Pictorialists the aesthetics, and the emotional impact of the image, was much more important than what was in front of the camera.
They commonly employed techniques like combination printing, soft or hazy focus, the manipulation of the negative, and the use of gum bichromate, to greatly lessen the detail and produce a more artistic image. Pictorialists took their inspiration from the Impressionist painters of the time.
The most prominent representative of these photographers was Alfred Stieglitz, who spent his life fighting for the recognition of photography as a medium as capable of artistic expression as painting or sculpture. Other prominent practitioners of the style included Edward Weston, Margrethe Mather and Henry Peach Robinson.
By around 1910, however, leading photographers of the time were beginning to regard pictorialism as outmoded and impossibly naïve -- a vision of the past.
Stieglitz himself was quoted as saying: "It is high time that the stupidity and sham in pictorial photography be struck a solar plexus blow."
The style declined rapidly after 1914 with the widespread emergence of Modernism.
REFERENCES:
- Pictorialsm, Robert Leggat
- Intersections of Photography and Painting, Victoria Restrepo
- Pictorialism in America
- Encyclopædia Britannica: Pictorialism
Pictorialism: Photography as Art
Posted by Kirsten On March - 06 - 2009Pictorialism was a photographic movement in vogue from around 1885, following the widespread introduction of the dry-plate process.
The term Pictorialism is used to describe photographs in which the actual scene shown is of less importance than the artistic quality of the image. For Pictorialists the aesthetics, and the emotional impact of the image, was much more important than what was in front of the camera.
Margrethe Mather, Florence Deshon
Posted by Kirsten On March - 06 - 2009Margrethe Mather, Florence Deshon, 1921, bromide print, 9 1/2”x 7 1/2”. Paul J. Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
With its soft focus, subtle tones, and storytelling quality, this image by Margrethe Mather (1885–1952) exemplifies pictorialist portraiture. Mather and close companion Edward Weston helped found the influential Camera Pictorialists of Los Angeles in 1914, but soon thereafter rejected the aesthetic hallmarks of pictorialism.
Sally Mann: What Remains
Posted by by Kirsten On March - 06 - 2009In Sally Mann's 2003 book What Remains, she takes on the subjects of mortality and death, and her haunting photographs are directly inspired by the pictorialist photographic style.
For her series of photographs in What Remains Mann uses the difficult and time-consuming glass-plate process, which results in an often dark, stressed and uneven surface, mirroring both the decay of the subjects and the movement of time that has claimed them.
