77
rial exposition necessary to raise the picture beyond its
utilitarian, descriptive function and into the realm of
intellect and invention. Reynolds’s theory of a “liberal
art” appealed to the practitioners of a medium whose
access to the status of fi ne art was thwarted by its as-
sociation with popular, applied art and commerce, and
his Discourses, like later works by John Burnet and
Sir Charles Eastlake, would be central to early texts on
photographic art, such as those by William Lake Price
and Henry Peach Robinson.
In Pictorial Effect in Photography (1869), Robinson
counselled photographers to look to established fi ne
arts for aesthetic principles and compositional modes.
This was consistent with the notion of art as a synthetic
activity, inspired by but only tangentially concerned
with nature. But photographic imaging was more con-
sistent with materialism, predicated on the observation
of readily defi ned and distinguished facts. In 1857,
Elizabeth, Lady Eastlake noted a prevalent belief in
photographic circles that “art had hitherto been but a
blundering groper after that truth which the cleanest and
precisest photography [...] was now destined to reveal”
(Eastlake 1857, 461). In pictorial terms, this type of
truth might be understood as ‘imitation,’ or superfi cial
resemblance to the original referent. Yet pictures might
also incorporate ‘natural’ truth, concurrent with physi-
ological sensation, and ‘artistic’ truth, pertinent to the
conventions of representation. All of this produced
confl icting expectations of photographic art, illustrated
by the reception of combination printing. The method
synthesized a single image from multiple negatives in
the service of a technical purpose: lenses did not have
the covering power to resolve a large group of fi gures,
nor could a practicable exposure time be achieved for
a format that might exceed seventy centimetres. Com-
bination-printed tableaux, notably by Oscar Gustav
Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson, were elaborate
fabrications inspired by popular history painting. Yet
what was unexceptional in painterly invention was
contentious in a photograph. Combination prints de-
ceived the viewer’s expectation of photographic truth;
particularly, the presumption that a photograph would
necessarily depict a single material referent as it ap-
peared at the moment of exposure.
Straight, unmanipulated photographs also produce
“untruths” such as apparent distortions in tonal rela-
tions, perspective, and scale. Manipulation was a
necessary corrective of those ostensible inaccuracies,
however truthful in optical terms. It could also make
the photograph more than an image “taken” directly
from nature without mediation or interpretation. A
photograph could be “made”; expected to function as
a picture, with its own visual qualities and expressive
modes. For Robinson, nature needed to be disciplined
and dignifi ed, and transformed into a “picture” through
the use of selection and composition (as well as several
negatives). His photographs showed a disposition of
elements—fi gures, foreground interest, peripheral fram-
ing, and background closure—that marked such work
as ‘pictorial’ rather than a spontaneous or serendipitous
transcription. Robinson’s subject matter of genre scenes
and literary themes owed much to Pre-Raphaelitism, but
that school was a problematic model for photographic
art, as its concern with detail and disdain for pictorial
convention was popularly thought to be inspired by an
uninfl ected, ‘mechanical,’ photographic vision.
The nineteenth century saw a shift in art from the
academic studio and its conventions, towards the in-
spirations of the natural world. There was an increased
interest in individual experience, infl uenced by chang-
ing social and economic structures and refl ected in the
Romantic movement in literature. A Romantic resistance
to urbanization and industrialization fed the interest in
plein-air painting, whose attentions to a naturalistic
diversity of light was detailed in effects of weather, foli-
age, and geological form, as discussed by Pierre-Henri
de Valenciennes and John Constable and more widely
couched in the theoretical vocabulary of the picturesque
and the sublime. Photographers cited the same pictorial
modes and locations: in France, Gustave Le Gray and
Eugène Cuvelier shadowed Barbizon painters such as
Théodore Rousseau at Fontainebleau, while in Britain’s
Lake District, Roger Fenton and George Washington
Wilson traced the literary paths of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Press reviews made
an explicit correlation between Fenton and Wilson’s
exhibition photographs and John Ruskin’s recasting of
naturalism into cogent formalism, detailing atmospheric
perspective and powerful luminosity as productive of a
transcendent sense of infi nity.
Academic art was largely based on the traditions of
the past, and in this respect, American artists and photog-
raphers were at a disadvantage in developing an indig-
enous art within a national history scarcely a century old.
Naturalism was a tremendous opportunity. In 1836, the
painter Thomas Cole argued that American artists should
attend to the “wildness” of unspoiled nature, and in the
same year, Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed ‘natural’
truth as a liberating, spiritual force. Transcendentalist
theory connected sight and insight; closely attentive
seeing produced a more profound spiritual perception,
and, with respect to John Ruskin’s idea of the “innocence
of the eye,” contravened academic convention. Such
theories supported luminist painting and Cole’s Hudson
River School, echoes of which appear in photographs
by William H. Rau, Carleton Watkins, and Eadweard
Muybridge. William J. Stillman presented a synthesis of
Ruskin’s naturalism and Emerson’s transcendentalism
in photographs and editorials for his weekly art journal,
The Crayon.