76
it fi rst appeared, Robinson’s composite photograph,
Fading Away, is acknowledged now to be one of the
most poignant visual evocations of death in Victorian
society. Peach Robinson’s Pictorial Effect in Photog-
raphy (1869), in which he fi rst articulated his theory of
a photographic art, continued to be infl uential into the
twentieth century.
At the end of the nineteenth century and the begin-
ning of the twentieth, art photography developed in
various forms in Europe and in North America. Peter
Henry Emerson in his treatise Naturalistic Photography
for Students of the Art (1889) articulated a vision of
photography as an independent art, only to repudiate
this position a year later in The Death of Naturalistic
Photography (1890). Pictorialism evolved contem-
poraneously in Europe and in North America as an
international movement. Pictorialists aimed to produce
photographs that were painterly in nature, mirroring the
ambiguous, amorphous qualitities of etchings and paint-
ings by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, for instance.
Their practice of lavishing great attention on individual
prints was also in keeping with the cultivated rarity of
the contemporaneous tradition in fi ne prints, illustrated
particularly by the etchings and drypoints of Whistler,
David Young Cameron and others. In England the ide-
als of Pictorialism were promoted by the Linked Ring
Brotherhood, which included photographers such as
James Craig Annan, Fred Holland Day, Frederick Evans
and many others. In 1902, in New York, Alfred Stieglitz
established the Photo-Secession, an association intended
to promote photography as a fi ne art, and the following
year he inaugurated Camera Work, which he produced
and edited from 1903 to 1917. Stieglitz published the
work of many of the American and European Pictorial-
ists in Camera Work.
Graham SmithSee Also: Hughes, Cornelius Jabez; Fenton, Roger;
Aubry, Charles Hippolyte Bilordeaux, Adolphe;
Braun, Adolphe; Talbot, William Henry Fox; Hill,
David Octavius, and Robert Adamson; Rejlander,
Oscar Gustav; Cameron, Julia Margaret; Hawarden,
Viscountess Clementina Elphinstone; Dodgson,
Charles Lutwidge (Carroll, Lewis); Price, William
Lake; Robinson, Henry Peach; Emerson, Peter Henry;
Pictorialism; Brotherhood of the Linked Ring; Annan,
James Craig; Day; Fred Holland, Evans, Frederick H.;
and Stieglitz, Alfred.
Further Reading
Hammond, Anne, “Naturalistic Vision and Symbolist Image:
The Pictorial Impulse,” in A New History of Photography,
ed. Michel Frizot, Cologne: Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft
mbH, 1998, 184–195.
Haworth-Booth, Mark, The Golden Age of British Photography,
1839-1900, Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture in association with the
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1984.
Spear, Benjamin [Henisch, Heinz K.], “Homage to Photography,”
History of Photography, 3 (1979), frontispiece.
Hughes, Cornelius Jabez, “On Art Photography,” reprinted in
Beaumont Newhall, Essays and Images: Illustrated Readings
in the History of Photography, New York: Museum of Modern
Art, ca 1980, 115.
Roberts, Pam, “Roger Fenton and the Still-Life Tradition,” in
Gordon Baldwin, Malcolm Daniel and Sara Greenough, with
contributions by Richard Pare, Pam Robertson and Roger
Taylor, All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger
Fenton 1852-1860, New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2004, 91–99.
Weaver, Mike, “Artistic Aspirations: The Lure of Fine Art,” in
A New History of Photography, ed. Michel Frizot, Cologne:
Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, 1998, 184–195.
Weaver, Mike, ed., British Photography in the Nineteenth
Century: The Fine Art Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989.ART PHOTOGRAPHY AND
AESTHETICS
Photography’s productions are descriptive and rela-
tively literal; their integrity as works of art depends on
transformative processes that are material, experiential,
and analytical. Aesthetic theory considers how works
of art are perceived or experienced and how the artistic
is understood and translated into visual characteristics.
Accordingly, photographic art requires consequential
aesthetics founded on formal attributes: composi-
tion, focus and distinctness, and relations of light and
shadow; material characteristics, such as image colour
and surface fi nish; and choice of subject matter. These
elements might be couched in the terms of other visual
arts, or simply borrowed, as George Davison observed
in 1891: “Photography has come late in the day. It would
be diffi cult for it to avoid likeness to something that had
preceded it” (Davison 1891, 721). This was more than a
defence of photography’s nascent status as an art form;
it was also a way of understanding photographs as pic-
tures. Indeed, photography, like painting and drawing,
is a transposition of mechanical and material realities
to a two-dimensional picture plane, so an analogy with
graphic art is appropriate.
The mere recording of surface facts is not suffi cient
to the wider consequence of art, and in photography,
a more formal consideration of pictorial modes was
derived from academic art, which endorsed invented,
synthetic picture-making, founded on classical, Re-
naissance, and Enlightenment notions of ideal beauty.
Art theory was codified in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries by Sir Joshua Reynolds at
London’s Royal Academy and Antoine Quatremère de
Quincy at the Institute des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Both
distinguished between the raw content of art—a direct
observation of nature—and the intellectual and picto-