Pictorialism is an aesthetic movement in photography that took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It emphasized the artistic qualities of photography, such as its ability to evoke emotion and interpretation, rather than its documentary purpose. Pictorialist photographers used a variety of techniques to manipulate photographs and create images that expressed their creativity. These images often had soft focus, were printed in colors other than black and white, and may have included visible brushstrokes or other surface manipulations.
Pictorialist photographers aimed to bring the impressionist qualities of 19th century painting to photography. They used techniques such as vague shapes, soft edges, and subdued tones to emphasize atmospheric elements in their pictures. They also drew inspiration from literature, often incorporating Symbolist themes and motifs into their work. For example, some pictorialist photographs focused on women, representing them as the embodiment of nature.
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A Bit of History.
The name itself derived from the thought of Henry Peach Robinson, British author of Pictorial Effect in Photography (1869). In his desire to separate photography as art from the scientific ends to which it had been applied, Robinson suggested appropriate subject matter and compositional devices, including the joining together of sections of different photographs to form a “composite” image. In the 1880s the British photographer Peter Henry Emerson also sought ways to promote personal expression in camera images. While critical of composite photographs, Emerson and his followers, looking to models provided by artists such as J.M.W. Turner, the painters of the Barbizon school, and the Impressionist painters, attempted to recreate atmospheric effects in nature through attention to focus and tonality.
Emerson’s book Naturalistic Photography (1889) was immensely influential in the last years of the 19th century. American and European photographers who followed its precepts organized associations and mounted exhibitions designed to show that the medium was capable of producing works of great beauty and expressiveness. Before 1900 the Linked Ring in Great Britain, the Photo Club of Paris, the Kleeblatt in Germany and Austria and, after the turn of the century, the Photo-Secession in the United States all promoted photography as fine art. Toward this end, some photographers condoned hand-work on the negative and employed special printing methods, using—among other chemicals—gum bichromate and gum bromoil. In addition to these procedures, which insured that each print was differentiated from others from the same negative, Pictorialist photographers also favoured the inclusion of monograms and the presentation of work in tasteful frames and mats. Frederick H. Evans, Robert Demachy, and Heinrich Kühn were among the notable Europeans who participated in the movement.
Pictorialists in the United States included Alvin Langdon Coburn, F. Holland Day, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, and Clarence H. White.
In the late work of Stieglitz, and that of Paul Strand and Edward Weston, American Pictorialism became less involved with atmospheric effects and beautiful subject matter, but for some years after World War I, the older ideals of pictorial beauty were retained by the group called Pictorial Photographers of America. By the late 1920s, as the aesthetics of Modernism took hold, the term Pictorialism came to describe a tired convention.
Gertrude Käsebier
(born May 18, 1852, Des Moines, Iowa, U.S.—died October 13, 1934, New York, New York)
was an American portrait photographer who was one of the founders of the influential Photo-Secession group and who is best known for her evocative images of women and domestic scenes.
In 1864 her family moved to Brooklyn, New York. Ten years later Gertrude Stanton married Eduard Käsebier, a German immigrant and businessman. After raising her family, from 1889 to 1896 she studied art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and quickly gravitated toward photography. Soon her work became recognized and was often exhibited. Her first solo exhibition was held in 1896 at the Boston Camera Club, and the following year Käsebier opened her own studio in New York City. Her photographs were included in the Philadelphia Photographic salons of 1898, 1899, and 1900. She exhibited her photograph titled The Manger at the salon of 1899, and it was purchased for $100, setting a new precedent in the photography art market. Her photographs also appeared in numerous magazines and were featured in the first issue of the influential Camera Work.
Like other photographers of the period working in the Pictorialist style, Käsebier was interested in promoting the medium as a fine art. As part of this effort, in 1902 she, Alfred Stieglitz, Clarence H. White, and Edward Steichen formed the Photo-Secession. She was also a member of the Professional Photographers of New York and of the Linked Ring in London and a cofounder of the Women’s Federation of the Photographers’ Association of America (1910). In 1916 she broke openly with Stieglitz and cofounded the Pictorial Photographers of America with White. About 1927 she closed her portrait studio. A retrospective exhibition of her photography was held at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in 1929.
Käsebier, Gertrude; Rodin, Auguste
Portrait of Auguste Rodin, photograph by Gertrude Käsebier, c. 1905; in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.(more)
Käsebier is best known for her sensitive depictions of motherhood and for her numerous portraits, often of famous artists and writers, including studies of the sculptor Auguste Rodin. In all her work she attempted to capture a symbolic, yet intimate view of her subjects. Käsebier worked primarily with platinum prints, although she began using a gum-bichromate process in 1901. Like many fellow Pictorialists, she often manipulated her photographs to fit her artistic intentions.
In the late 20th and the 21st century Kasebier was the subject of many exhibitions, including two major retrospectives, one at the Delaware Art Museum in 1979 and the other at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (which later traveled to the Philadelphia Museum of Art) in 1992. Her best-known photograph, Blessed Art Thou Among Women (1899), was featured on a U.S. postage stamp in 2002.
Käsebier, Gertrude; Rodin, Auguste
Portrait of Auguste Rodin, photograph by Gertrude Käsebier, c. 1905; in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C....(more)
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. 12083u)
Doris Ulmann
(born May 29, 1882, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Aug. 28, 1934, New York City)
was an American photographer known for her portraits of people living in rural parts of the American South.
Born into a well-to-do New York family, Ulmann received a progressive education at the Ethical Culture School and took courses in psychology and law at Columbia University. She studied photography with Clarence H. White, first at Columbia in 1907 and later at the Clarence H. White School of Photography. She married another amateur photographer in 1917 (divorced 1925) and became active in the Pictorial Photographers of America, an organization founded by White and others that advocated Pictorialism. Although Ulmann captured landscapes and still lifes, she specialized in portraiture, in 1918 producing a book of portraits of the medical faculty at Johns Hopkins University and then A Portrait Gallery of American Editors (1925).
In the early 1920s she began to travel to rural communities in the hope of finding (as she later expressed it) human faces that showed “the marks of having lived intensely.” Her quest took her to Mennonite and Shaker communities in New York and Pennsylvania, to the Appalachian Mountains (in 1925), and to the South Carolina coastal plain (beginning in 1929). From 1927 on, often accompanied by folk singer and music archivist John Jacob Niles, Ulmann created portraits of the rural residents of Appalachia—descendants of Scotch-Irish immigrants, whose folkways at the time seemed to be vanishing. In revealing to the wider world what seemed to be a more authentic way of living, Ulmann also sought to arouse interest in regional American culture; some of her Appalachian images were used to illustrate Allen H. Eaton’s Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands (1937). During her travels to South Carolina, Ulmann photographed the Gullah workers (descendants of West African slaves who settled mainly on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia and developed a distinctive creole language and culture) on her friend Julia Peterkin’s plantation. Many of these images were used to illustrate Peterkin’s book Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933), documenting the vanishing Gullah culture.
Ulmann considered herself an “amateur” in the sense that she did not photograph for commercial gain. She was knowledgeable about her craft and controlled the entire process herself, but her aesthetic taste and psychological sensitivity rather than her technical skill give her portraits their exceptional character.
A photograph of an Appalachian woman, titled Old woman in sunbonnet, no. 2
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Clarence H. White
(born April 8, 1871, West Carlisle, Ohio, U.S.—died July 8, 1925, Mexico City, Mexico)
was an American photographer known for subtle portraits of women and children and also as an influential teacher of photography.
Boy with a Cart, platinum print by Clarence H. White of his oldest son, 1898.
White had from his early years an appetite for artistic and intellectual pursuits. After finishing high school in Newark, Ohio, he took a job as an accountant in his father’s grocery business and married in 1893. He taught himself the art of photography and photographed constantly despite his limited free time and finances; he costumed and posed family members and friends in the early dawn or evening hours, in their homes and in the open and produced elegantly posed and subtly lit images. White’s work came to public attention in 1898 at the First Philadelphia Photographic Salon; asked to be a judge the following year, White met important figures in American art photography, among them F. Holland Day, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, and Alfred Stieglitz.
In 1902 White helped found Photo-Secession, a group of photographers that promoted Pictorialism, a fine-arts approach to photography. After a few years of making a living as a traveling portraitist, White moved with his family in 1906 to New York City. A year later he was hired to teach the first photography course to be given at Columbia University, a circumstance that enabled him to renounce commercial work. In 1910 he and several friends—including Day, Käsebier, and the painter Max Weber—began a summer school, held first on Seguin Island in Maine and later in East Canaan, Connecticut. Encouraged by his friends, White in 1914 opened the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York City. He also taught at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. His influence on the next generation of photographers was notable; many among his students—who included Laura Gilpin, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Paul Outerbridge, Ralph Steiner, and Doris Ulmann—went on to become successful photographers.
Although White had become a socialist early in his career, he did not consider the camera a tool for social change but regarded the medium as a means of expressing beauty. Until the end of his life, he continued to promote artistic photography through teaching, exhibitions, and associations with advertising art directors. The genteel subject matter and subtle lighting effects visible in his work came to epitomize the Pictorialist approach to photography at the turn of the century.
The Sea (Rose Pastor Stokes, Caritas Island, Connecticut),1909. Platinum print.
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Louis Daguerre
(born November 18, 1787, Cormeilles, near Paris, France—died July 10, 1851, Bry-sur-Marne)
was a French painter and physicist who invented the first practical process of photography, known as the daguerreotype. Though the first permanent photograph from nature was made in 1826/27 by Nicéphore Niépce of France, it was of poor quality and required about eight hours’ exposure time. The process that Daguerre developed required only 20 to 30 minutes.
Daguerre was at first an inland revenue officer and then a scene painter for the opera. In 1822 at Paris he opened the Diorama, an exhibition of pictorial views, with various effects induced by changes in the lighting. A similar establishment that he opened in Regent’s Park, London, was destroyed by fire in 1839. Niépce, who since 1814 had been attempting to obtain permanent pictures by the action of sunlight, learned in 1826 of Daguerre’s efforts in the same field. The two became partners in the development of Niépce’s heliographic process from 1829 until the death of Niépce in 1833. Daguerre continued his experiments, and it was he who discovered that exposing an iodized silver plate in a camera would result in a lasting image if the latent image on the plate was developed by exposure to fumes of mercury and then fixed (made permanent) by a solution of common salt. On January 9, 1839, a full description of his daguerreotype process was announced at a meeting of the Academy of Sciences by the eminent astronomer and physicist François Arago. Daguerre was appointed an officer of the Legion of Honour. In 1839 Daguerre and the heir of Niépce were assigned annuities of 6,000 francs and 4,000 francs, respectively, in return for their photographic process.
View of the Boulevard du Temple, taken by Daguerre in 1838 in Paris, includes the earliest known photograph of a person. The image shows a busy street, but because the exposure had to continue for four to five minutes the moving traffic is not visible. At the lower right, however, a man apparently having his boots polished, and the bootblack polishing them, were motionless enough for their images to be captured.
Ansel Adams
(born February 20, 1902, San Francisco, California, U.S.—died April 22, 1984, Carmel, California)
was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating "pure" photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He and Fred Archer developed a system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a technical understanding of how the tonal range of an image is the result of choices made in exposure, negative development, and printing.
Adams was a life-long advocate for environmental conservation, and his photographic practice was deeply entwined with this advocacy. At age 14, he was given his first camera during his first visit to Yosemite National Park. He developed his early photographic work as a member of the Sierra Club. He was later contracted with the United States Department of the Interior to make photographs of national parks. For his work and his persistent advocacy, which helped expand the National Park system, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980.
Adams was a key advisor in the founding and establishment of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an important landmark in securing photography's institutional legitimacy. He helped to stage that department's first photography exhibition, helped found the photography magazine Aperture, and co-founded the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.
Salt Flats near Wendover, Utah, c. 1948
gelatin silver print, mounted on board, printed 1979
Henri Cartier-Bresson
(born 22 August 1908 – died 3 August 2004) )
was a French artist and humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35mm film.[1] He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment.
Although Cartier-Bresson became frustrated with Lhote's "rule-laden" approach to art, the rigorous theoretical training later helped him identify and resolve problems of artistic form and composition in photography. In the 1920s, schools of photographic realism were popping up throughout Europe but each had a different view on the direction photography should take. The Surrealist movement, founded in 1924, was a catalyst for this paradigm shift. Cartier-Bresson began socializing with the Surrealists at the Café Cyrano, in the Place Blanche. He met a number of the movement's leading protagonists, and was drawn to the Surrealist movement's technique of using the subconscious and the immediate to influence their work. The historian Peter Galassi explains:
The Surrealists approached photography in the same way that Aragon and Breton...approached the street: with a voracious appetite for the usual and unusual...The Surrealists recognized in plain photographic fact an essential quality that had been excluded from prior theories of photographic realism. They saw that ordinary photographs, especially when uprooted from their practical functions, contain a wealth of unintended, unpredictable meanings.
Cartier-Bresson matured artistically in this stormy cultural and political atmosphere. But, although he knew the concepts, he couldn't express them; dissatisfied with his experiments, he destroyed most of his early paintings.
In 1952, Cartier-Bresson published his book Images à la sauvette, whose English-language edition was titled The Decisive Moment, although the French language title actually translates as "images on the sly" or "hastily taken images",Images à la sauvette included a portfolio of 126 of his photos from the East and the West. The book's cover was drawn by Henri Matisse. For his 4,500-word philosophical preface, Cartier-Bresson took his keynote text from Volume 2 of the Memoirs of 17th century Cardinal de Retz, "Il n'y a rien dans ce monde qui n'ait un moment decisif" ("There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment"). Cartier-Bresson applied this to his photographic style. He said: "Photographier: c'est dans un même instant et en une fraction de seconde reconnaître un fait et l'organisation rigoureuse de formes perçues visuellement qui expriment et signifient ce fait" ("To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.").
Both titles came from Tériade, the Greek-born French publisher whom Cartier-Bresson admired. He gave the book its French title, Images à la Sauvette, loosely translated as "images on the run" or "stolen images." Dick Simon of Simon & Schuster came up with the English title The Decisive Moment. Margot Shore, Magnum's Paris bureau chief, translated Cartier-Bresson's French preface into English.
"Photography is not like painting," Cartier-Bresson told the Washington Post in 1957. "There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative", he said. "Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever."
The photo Rue Mouffetard, Paris, taken in 1954, has since become a classic example of Cartier-Bresson's ability to capture a decisive moment. He held his first exhibition in France at the Pavillon de Marsan in 1955.
Henri Cartier-Bresson The Var department. Hyères, France. 1932. © Henri Cartier-Bresson | Magnum Photosy.