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the time. The audience for the journal was the serious
amateur photographer who wanted to perfect his craft,
and aspired to make a photograph situated within an
artistic tradition. The reviews made a point of aesthetic
analysis, and in the fi rst issue, the Linked Ring exhibi-
tion was lauded for showcasing expressive photographs
that eschewed technique over purer artistic aspirations.
In these early years, the annual reported on the latest
artistic developments, and followed the careers of the
major international fi gures—with news and reproduc-
tions of works by important British photographer H.P.
Robinson, pioneering American Alvin Langdon Coburn,
venerable Baron Adolf de Mayer and newcomer Edward
Steichen. Exhibitions large and small were covered,
along with the groundbreaking salons at the turn of the
century, including the Photographic Society of Philadel-
phia Salons and the Photo-Club de Paris. This focus on
exhibitions would remain throughout the life of the title.
As the annual was published in Great Britain, the yearly
Royal Photographic Society exhibition and other British
displays were covered, along with reports and analysis
of the year’s exhibits in Europe, the United States,
Canada, Australia, South Africa, and Japan. With the
exception of a few lead articles on more general topics,
the body of the journal was given over to geographically
centered assessments of the state of artistic photography
and critiques of the numerous reproductions published
in every volume. The editors also opened the pages to
works from readers for review.
The annual remained devoted to pictorial photography
and the salon movement for close to 70 years. As the in-
ternational art world changed, and pictorial photography
was no longer considered the most progressive form, the
emphasis of the periodical shifted to the myriad small
photographic societies that cropped up in every major
metropolitan area as well as smaller cities and towns.
These groups kept the pictorial photography movement
alive in the 20th century. In 1961, the title changed to
New Photograms, and contained the expected reviews of
exhibitions worldwide and analysis of individual works.
But the editor gently criticized pictorial photography
for being somewhat conformist and lacking in vitality.
He announced an expansion of content to embrace less
conventional aspects of the genre, including photojour-
nalism and more experimental works. Curiously, this
was be to the last volume.
Becky Simmons
See also: Ward, Henry Snowden; Ward, Catherine
Weed Barnes; Hinton, Alfred Horsley; Amateur
Photographer (1884– ); Demachy, (Léon) Robert;
Stieglitz, Alfred; Art Photography; Pictorialism;
Brotherhood of the Linked Ring; Robinson, Henry
Peach; Coburn, Alvin Langdon; Steichen, Edward
J.; Photo-Club de Paris; and Royal Photographic
Society.Further Reading
Harker, Margaret, The Linked Ring: The Secession Movement in
Photography in Britain, 1892–1910, London: Heinemann; A
Royal Photographic Society Publication, 1979.
Keller, Ulrich F., “The Myth of Art Photography: A Sociological
Analysis,” History of
Photography, vol. 8, no. 4 (Oct.–Dec.1984): 249–272.
Le Pictorialisme en France, Paris: Editions Hoëbeke/Bibliothèque
nationale, 1992.
Le Salon de photographie: Les écoles pictorialistes en Europe et
aux Etats-Unis vers 1900, Paris: Musée Rodin, 1993.
Sternberger, Paul Spencer, Between Amateur and Aesthete: The
Legitimization of Photography as Art in America, 1880–1900.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001.PHOTOGRAPHIC AND FINE ARTS
JOURNAL, THE
The Photographic Art Journal was published between
1851 and 1860 in New York City by Henry Hunt Snel-
ling; the journal was retitled The Photographic and Fine
Arts Journal in 1854. The publication was the second
photographic trade journal produced in the United
States (following behind the Daguerrean Journal, later
Humphrey’s Journal), and offers insights into the de-
velopment of the daguerreotype to the age of collodion
in the United States, with particular focus on New York
City in the age of Mathew Brady.
The journal’s view of photography aligned it more
with the fi ne arts than the scientifi c approach to photog-
raphy advanced in the pages of The American Journal of
Photography and Humphrey’s. “Photography,” Snelling
wrote, was viewed “too much as a mechanical occupa-
tion...In too many instances men enter into it because
they can get nothing else to do; without the least appre-
ciation of its merits as an art of refi nement, without the
taste to guide them and without the love and ambition
to study more than its practical applications.” Such a
narrow interest neglected both the sciences “drawing,
painting and sculpture, sister arts, a knowledge of which
[would] elevate taste and direct the operator into the
more classical walks of his profession,” Snelling wrote
in the fi rst issue of 1851. He wrote of his concern with
the moral elements of the daguerrean art but the journal
also serialized technical manuals like Philip Delamotte’s
The Practice of Photography and Désiré van Monk-
hoven Photography on Collodion.
Like its contemporaries, the journal relied on reprints
to fi ll its pages, drawing widely from publications as
diverse as Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine, the London Art
Journal and La Lumiere on such topics ranging from
forgery to photographic chemistry. A series of unsigned