history amateur photography

‘Amateur’ is not a term specific to photography. An amateur is someone who does something for the love of it, whether it is photography, sport, music, or horticulture. Like many other amateur movements that flourished from the mid-19th century on, amateur photography emerged from the social and economic conditions of modern capitalism. With the growing distinction between work and leisure, and the class issues centred around these activities, ‘amateur’ served as a vital differentiating category, embodying the virtue of economic disinterest. Amateur photographers were first and foremost what they were not: professionals, whose work was understood to be controlled by market demands. Whereas professionals bowed to client expectations, it was assumed, amateurs photographed for their own improvement and pleasure. Consequently, they have come to occupy a special place in the history of photography, being seen as innovators boldly elaborating both the technological and aesthetic aspects of the medium. (In truth, professional/amateur distinctions are not always clear cut. Amateurs have been constrained by conventions sometimes as rigid as those observed by professionals; and have frequently sought profit, just as professionals have often been innovators.)

However, there has also been the idea of the amateur as unskilled ‘snapshooter’ without knowledge or sophistication. This discrepancy reflects shifting attitudes towards amateurs during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, part of a larger industrial transition that included photography in its sweep. Whereas the amateur photographer of the 19th century tended to be wealthy, leisured, and cultured, and sometimes owned a country house, the 20th-century amateur was increasingly middle or even, by the 1950s, working class. This shift may be explained by the gradual industrialization of photographic products and services, including retail developments like the growth of chain stores and mail-order companies, resulting in photography's growing accessibility, affordability, and ease of operation. Thus, within the vast realm of amateur photographic practice, photographers have, variously, contributed directly to the development, invention, and exploitation of photographic equipment and techniques; rejected commercialism altogether by emphasizing aesthetic and narrative potentialities of the medium; or benefited directly from commercial innovations.

Since the invention of photography, amateurs have constituted a distinct presence within the larger sphere of photographic practice. Clubs were formed as early as the 1840s. In England, the Calotype Society was established in 1847. Its early members, including Hugh Welch Diamond, Roger Fenton, William Newton, and Frederick Archer, were typically men of science, curious about new technologies and their applications. In France, the Société Héliographique formed in 1851, counting among its members Baron Gros, Hippolyte Bayard, Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq, and the painter Eugène Delacroix. As the wet-plate process became widespread during the early 1850s, more amateurs took up photography, a trend reflected in the growth and proliferation of organizations: the Calotype Society became the Photographic Society of London in 1853 (and the Royal Photographic Society in 1894), the Société Héliographique was replaced by the Société Française de Photographie (SFP) in 1854, and New York's first camera club appeared in 1861. While each of these groups included some professionals, amateurs dominated discussions of both experimental technologies and aesthetics.

What might be termed the Amateur Movement proper commenced in the 1880s with the advent of the dry-plate process and the hand-held camera. These technological advances, increasingly mass produced, considerably expanded the numbers of amateur photographers. A significant consequence was that amateur groups, whose purposes were often as much social as intellectual, soon began to make distinctions among themselves. From the 1880s to the First World War, three different types of amateurs may be distinguished: serious amateurs, art amateurs, and mass amateurs. These groups defined themselves according to the technologies they used, the subjects and approaches they favoured, and the institutional structures—societies, publications, exhibition venues—they maintained. Remarkably, divisions occurred in parallel form across industrialized Western Europe and the USA.7

Serious amateurs

Variously known as ‘competent amateurs’ and ‘skilled amateurs’, these formed many seminal associations during the 1880s and early 1890s. The evolving Photographic Society of Great Britain and the Manchester Amateur Photographic Society, the Deutsche Gesellschaft von Freunden der Photographie in Berlin, the Société d'Excursions des Amateurs Photographes and the Stéréo-Club Français in France, and the Society of Amateur Photographers of New York in the USA, represent only a fraction of the organizations that flourished in this period. Initially at least, they maintained the goals and aspirations of the earliest clubs. Functioning as a kind of technological consortium, members shared information about new processes and equipment—stereoscopy, flash, detective cameras— but on a larger scale. Regular meetings featuring lantern-slide presentations were a common form of exchange. Moreover, a profusion of new photographic literature began to appear. Books like Josef Maria Eder's 1886 treatise on instantaneous photography, Die Moment-Photographie, translated into several languages, served to define the parameters of amateur interests in addition to disseminating a rapidly expanding body of photographic knowledge. Journals representing the interests of various specific amateur organizations proliferated, including Amateur Photographer (London), Der Amateur-Photograph (Düsseldorf), L'Amateur-photographe (Paris), and American Amateur Photographer (New York), to name but a few. Amateur journals in particular were often international in scope, and regularly featured articles describing technological breakthroughs in other countries.

Journals also published examples of amateur work, increasingly often as photomechanical printing methods improved. A common example was the instantaneous or stop-action photograph, the curious product of faster emulsions and shutters. Images of animals, people, and objects arrested in mid-trajectory saturated journals throughout the 1890s, often prompting heated aesthetic debates—not all amateurs agreed on the aesthetic merits of instantaneity. Attitudes tended to reflect class divisions. Serious amateurs, who tended to exalt the instantaneous photograph as a manifestation of recent technological advances, were generally upper-middle-class men (women were rare among serious amateurs) employed in business and the sciences, who pursued photography as an offshoot of their professions. For some of them, photography served as an ‘agreeable pastime, an intelligent occupation’, as Albert Londe, the prototypical serious amateur, noted in one of his many books on instantaneous photography. For others, photography's rapid development, both technologically and commercially, expressed perfectly the ideals of modern industrial capitalism, and many doubtless hoped to profit from patents or the manufacture of photographic products; the Lumière brothers in France represent one such success story. Still for others, photography offered a pretext for sociability. This is reflected in the enormous numbers of amateur photographic societies, many of them regional and specialized, that flourished throughout Europe and the USA from the late 19th century onwards.

Art amateurs

By the mid-1890s a gulf began to appear between scientifically and artistically motivated amateurs. The latter were already a common photographic type, particularly in Britain. Charles Dodgson, Julia Margaret Cameron, Henry Peach Robinson, and Peter Henry Emerson (each of whom, it may be noted, dreamed of commercial success) had established the image of the art amateur as a kind of progressive aesthete, one capable of wedding modern technology to fine-art traditions. But in the 1890s, as amateur ranks swelled to record proportions, art amateurs began to distinguish themselves more pointedly from the rest. This was apparent on numerous levels. Early on, art amateurs exhibited their tonalist renditions of landscapes, portraits, and genre scenes among examples of scientific photography such as X-rays and photomicrographs. Later, they began organizing separate shows which presented carefully selected examples of artistic photography in a more exclusively aesthetic environment.

In Vienna, the exhibition of artistic photographs mounted in 1891 by the recently formed Club der Amateur-Photographen served as a model for art photography exhibitions in other countries. (International contacts and influences were particulary important at this time.) In Hamburg, Ernst Juhl and Kunsthalle-director Alfred Lichtwark were instrumental in organizing a major series of Kunstphotographie salons between 1893 and 1903. For Lichtwark, art photography—effectively, pictorialism—was part of a larger project to use amateur creativity to promote aesthetic education and improve national taste. Hamburg's leading art amateurs were the Hofmeister brothers. In Britain, the Linked Ring Brotherhood broke away from the Photographic Society of Great Britain in 1892, and inaugurated its own annual salons the following year. Similarly, the Photo-Club de Paris formed in 1888, an offshoot of the SFP. In Russia, the Daguerre Society in Kiev played a similar role. In the USA, finally, the newly formed Camera Club of New York, with Stieglitz as editor of its journal, Camera Notes, offered a provisional home to art photography until conflicts arising out of the Philadelphia Photographic Salons (1898-1901) led to the formation of the Photo-Secession in 1902. Common to many members of these groups was their preference for complicated processes like bromoil and gum bichromate prints that resembled watercolours or graphic work rather than photographs.

Art amateurs, briefly at the vanguard of photographic modernism, claimed their status on the grounds of good taste. While in theory anyone capable of demonstrating sensitivity and aesthetic knowledge through photography might be included, practitioners tended to be well educated, leisured, and wealthy. In Europe, art amateurs were often men of high birth, while in the USA a more meritocratic standard applied, which allowed for the inclusion of women and even Midwesterners. In the end, art amateurs were marginalized by the socio-economic changes that took place in the first decades of the 20th century. Moreover, their achievement was eclipsed by the ‘straight’ approach of serious amateurs, whose unleashing of novel pictorial effects through instantaneity—dynamism, contingency, fragmentation—would be picked up as the vocabulary of New Vision photography in the 1920s.

Mass amateurs

It was mass amateurs who eventually claimed the amateur title, becoming permanent beneficiaries of the industrial exploitation of photography. Mass amateurs were born out of the success of a single firm, the Eastman Dry Plate Film Company, which produced its first roll-film camera in 1888. By 1900 the company had released an entire line of easy-to-use, inexpensive cameras, and established the world's first commercial processing service. The Kodak system was so user friendly that in 1900 the company released a child's camera, the Brownie. Priced at 5 shillings ($1), it was affordable for most middle-class children; moreover, its use established picture-making habits that would carry over into adulthood. (Some young people, though, like Jacques-Henri Lartigue and Alice Austen, were lucky enough to be given much fancier equipment.) Women were also targeted as an important new consumer group: hence the long-running Kodak Girl advertising campaign. But, more than just equipment and services, Kodak offered an entire culture. The name itself was a made-up word: George Eastman, the founder of the firm, saw the letter K as ‘firm and unyielding’, and wanted something unique and memorable. ‘Kodak’ formed the root of an entire vocabulary: ‘Kodakers’, as the company's clients were called, could subscribe to the journal Kodakery, and could join Kodak clubs, which issued Kodak Fellowship badges to members so that they could recognize each other while ‘kodaking’ in the field. Availability and name recognition were key to the company's success, and shops emblazoned with the Kodak name sprang up around the world. Such rapid and widespread proliferation—by 1898, 1 1/2 million cameras had been sold—gave rise to what became known internationally as the ‘Kodak fiend’, a photographer lacking not only technical skill and taste, but also manners (women in bathing attire were favourite subjects). Serious amateurs and art amateurs alike reacted with undisguised horror to the habits and output of their mass amateur cousins. As Stieglitz cautioned in 1907, ‘Don't believe you became an artist the instant you received a gift Kodak on Xmas morning.’ In truth, most mass amateurs were not interested in art, and cheerfully ignored the tips for ‘successful photography’ issued by manufacturers and photographic magazines. Their prime concern was to record their lives and fill albums with personal snapshots.

Since the success of Kodak, cameras and services have continued to develop, expanding amateur markets. The list is long: the triumph of colour film in the 1960s, the Instamatic revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, then disc cameras, minilabs, APS (Advanced Photographic System), and point-and-shoot digital photography by the end of the century. While publications, clubs, and competitions continue to help in distinguishing amateur photography from mere snapshooting, the definition today easily embraces all non-commercial uses of photographic technologies.

— Kevin Moore

Featured article: The Rothschild Autochromes.

Bibliography

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