612
George Eastman introduced the Kodak camera in 1888.
Rather than a technical innovation, Eastman’s revolution
turned on a marketing and business reorganisation typi-
cal of monopoly capitalism. The Kodak was a small box
camera without a viewfi nder, which came pre-loaded
with celluloid roll fi lm. When the roll was fi nished the
camera was sent to Eastman’s company, who processed
the fi lm and returned the prints complete with a newly
loaded Kodak. As The Kodak Primer made clear the
effect was to: “furnish anybody, man, woman or child,
who has suffi cient intelligence to point a box straight
and press a button” the means of making photographs
without “exceptional facilities or, in fact, any special
knowledge of the art” (Coe, George Eastman and the
Early Photographers, 67). Professional studios lingered
on, but Eastman’s system decisively shifted photogra-
phy onto the terrain of the new mass amateur. This new
amateur photography took off because it dovetailed with
wider social changes, including, for some, increased
leisure time and an improved standard of living. In the
early years of photography amateurs had been wealthy
gentleman, but the new amateur was a lower middle-
class hobbyist with a little free time and some spare
cash. Small folding cameras also became increasingly
popular during 1890s. The result was a wider range of
subjects and an increasing casualness in framing and
composition. The people who made these images were
primarily interested in recording rights of passage and
fun moments and were largely unconcerned with the
‘rules of art.’ Paul Martin’s pictures of high days and
holidays, made after 1892 with a hand-held camera, are
probably the best know.
The rise of the mass amateur and the preoccupation
of the Photographic Society with representing a range of
interests lead to a number of photographers committed
to art increasingly taking a separate path. In 1885 P.H.
Emerson, with Captain Abney, George Davison and
others, founded the Camera Club of London as a forum
for ‘serious’ amateur photography (in the earlier sense
of ‘amateur’). After meeting the painter Thomas Frank
Goodall, Emerson became committed to ‘Naturalism,’ a
supposedly truthful depiction of nature that emphasised
rural labour. He also employed a selective focus, which
he believed was closer to actual perception. Emerson’s
photographs typically consist of formally composed
genre subjects from rural Norfolk; important examples
appeared as platinum prints in Life and Landscape of
the Norfolk Broads (1885). His infl uential manifesto
Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, was
published in 1889. Frank Meadow Sutcliffe worked in a
less self-consciously artistic mode photographing Whit-
by, but related concerns are visible in his pictures.
In the middle of the 1880s W. Jerome Harrison
established a number of photographic surveys of rural
Warwickshire with the aim of recording old buildings
as well as declining folk traditions. The photographic
survey movement rapidly spread and Harrison, in
collaboration with the industrialist Benjamin Stone,
attempted to establish a national organization. How-
ever, Harrison’s strident challenge to the photographic
establishment proved his undoing, and Stone—who
had become Tory M.P. for Birmingham—set up the
National Photographic Record Association in 1897,
which generated thousands of images of rural Britain.
The international movement known as Pictorialism,
which developed in the fi nal decade of the century was,
in the main, equally anti-urban in orientation, though it
followed a different aesthetic path to either Emerson or
the surveyists. In the wake of the Vienna Camera Club
exhibition of 1891, a number of photo-associations split
from the established societies. The Linked Ring Broth-
erhood broke from the Photographic Society in 1892,
conducting a single-minded campaign for Pictorialist or
artistic photography. This organisation restricted num-
bers, members, who had to be elected, never exceeding
seventy fi ve. Key fi gures include: Robinson, James Craig
Annan, George Davison, Frederick H. Evans and two
Americans domiciled in England—F. Holland Day and
Alvin Langdon Coburn.
Pictorialism developed existing aesthetic concerns,
but these photographers chose to pursue art-photogra-
phy with vitality. Adopting conventional subjects and
compositional modes from the existing pictorial arts,
Pictorialists often gravitated to specialist photographing
printing techniques that gave their images the appear-
ance of drawings in ink or chalk and etchings. They
tended to do extensive work on negative and print, giving
the fi nal image a unique and handcrafted appearance;
they adopted a soft-focus approach and worked to sup-
press detail. Some were wealthy amateurs; others were
professionals with a sideline in exhibition pictures; yet
others still occupied a specialist niche in the amateur
leisure market for photographic commodities, but their
work entailed a common strategy of distinction, sepa-
rating its proponents from ‘mere’ hobbyists. Amateur
Photographer, a journal promoting a softer version of
this Symbolist aesthetic, appeared between 1884 and- The ethos of Pictorialism dominated photography
until the rise of photo-journalism and modernism after
WWI, but it survived much longer as a camera-club
aesthetic; arguably, it still does.
Steve Edwards
See also: Wedgwood, Thomas; Davy, Sir Humphry;
Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé; Daguerreotype;
Talbot, William Henry Fox; Pencil of Nature;
Herschel, Sir John Frederick William; Calotype and
Talbotype; Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé; Beard,
Richard; Hogg, Jabez; Claudet, Antoine-François-
Jean; Henneman, Nicolaas; Hill, David Octavius,