Pictorialism, as a term, characterized photography whose intention and expression derived from fine art, as opposed to that whose object was purely scientific, documentary, or commercial. Although pictorial photography was specifically identified in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, its principles were first established by H. P. Robinson in Pictorial Effect in Photography (1869). Robinson asserted that photographic art should imitate the conventions of academic painting, and his own photographs showed a disposition of elements—figures, foreground interest, peripheral framing, and background closure—that marked such work as a purposefully constructed picture rather than a spontaneous or serendipitous transcription of nature. A photograph might be ‘taken’ from nature, but a picture had to be ‘made’, and differing perspectives on how this might be achieved enlivened debates between Robinson and P. H. Emerson, who described photography as ‘A Pictorial Art’ in an 1886 lecture at the Camera Club, London. Emerson's ideas reflected an increasing interest in the possibility of personal expression in photography, while others, including George Davison and A. Horsley Hinton, took from theories of Impressionist painting an awareness of the power of individual temperament to affect what the artist sees and represents to the viewer. By the late 1890s, the Symbolist movement in literature, art, and music inspired an interest in allegorical and idealist subject matter, and expressive rather than mimetic representation.
In photography, as in the decorative arts, there was a reaction against mechanization and industrialization. The advent of snapshot photography resurrected long-standing accusations that the photograph was the automatic product of a machine; now, more than ever, photographs were popularly seen as both instantaneous and unmediated. Photographers such as Alfred Maskell were intrigued by a notion of art as the unique consequence of additive effort, which suggested that it was the photographer, not the apparatus, who ‘made’ the picture. This, with a concurrent interest in a pre-industrial, artisanal tradition, encouraged the adoption of hand-made and home-made photographic papers, including gum bichromate and brush-developed platinotypes (platinum prints). The textured, inflected surfaces of such photographs were very different from the machine-made perfection of manufactured printing papers.
Many of these processes developed at a time when photographers were rather self-conscious about the role and status of their medium as an art form, both in its own right and in relation to, or even in competition with, the fine and graphic arts. There was dismay at the increasing industrial exploitation of photography, and at practices and institutions that pandered to a commercial and professional establishment. In the 1890s, this encouraged a secession from traditional photographic associations and the founding of groups dedicated to artistic practice, such as the Vienna Camera Club, the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring (London), the Society for the Encouragement of Amateur Photography (Hamburg), the Photo-Club de Paris, the Cercle d'Art Photographique (Brussels), the Photo-Secession (New York), the Studio Club (Toronto), and the Sydney Camera Circle. Many groups had a multinational membership that organized or contributed to international exhibitions of art photography, including the Photographic Salon of the Linked Ring (from 1893), the exhibitions at the Hamburg Kunsthalle (1893-1903), the International Exhibitions at Glasgow (1901) and Turin (1900 and 1903), and the Albright Art Gallery (Buffalo, New York, 1910). Pictorial photography was promoted in the pages of periodicals such as Amateur Photographer and Photograms of the Year (London), Photographic Review (Lvov, Poland), Die Künst in der Photographie (Berlin), Camera Work (New York; Alfred Stieglitz, editor), La fotografia artistica (Italy), and Vestnik fotografii (Moscow; Nikolai Petrov, art director). The Studio (London) published two special issues on pictorial photography, edited by Charles Holme in 1905 and 1908.
When Camera Work ceased publication in 1917, the journal had outlasted most other expressions of pictorialism: Stieglitz showed modern sculpture and painting in the old Photo-Secession gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue, and progressive photographers increasingly looked towards formalism and abstraction. While pictorialism lost its currency as a movement, it persisted as an aesthetic diaspora, whose concern with craft, the constructed image, and personal expression have remained influential. As Paul L. Anderson argued in 1917, pictorial photography looked for a harmony of matter, mind, and spirit; the first was addressed through objective technique and process, the second in a considered application of the principles of composition and design, and the last by the development of a subjective and spiritual ‘motive’.
— Hope Kingsley
Bibliography
- Anderson, P. L., Pictorial Photography: Its Principles and Practice (1917).
- Bunnell, P. (ed.), A Photographic Vision: Pictorial Photography 1889-1923 (1980).
- Le Salon de Photographie. Les écoles pictorialistes en Europe et aux États-Unis vers 1900 (1993).
- Kopanski, K. W., and Philipp, C. G. (eds.), Meisterwerke russischer und deutscher Kunstphotographie um 1900: Sergei Lobovikov und die Brüder Hofmeister (1999)
