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photographers Oscar Rejlander (1813–1875) and H. P.
Robinson (1830–1901), believed that the photograph
must therefore be capable of similar manipulation of
materials as that enjoyed by the painter or printmaker.
Manipulated photography became the rage which spread
to Europe and the United States. Many felt that the image
became art the more it did not look like a photograph.
The processes allowed for coloured images with soft,
textured surfaces, similar to the mezzotint, etching,
watercolour, chalk, pencil, and crayon drawing, and
even to the extent of mirroring oil painting. Thus their
photographs took on more and more the visual charac-
teristics of artists’ prints and drawings. As a result the
characteristic sharpness of the camera’s negative dis-
solved and ‘out of focus’ became the prevailing style.
The justifi cation, both theoretically and stylistically, was
derived from the American painter James Abbot McNeill
Whistler (1834–1903) with his “out of focus” paintings
and etchings and his advocacy of “art for art’s sake”; that
a picture should be nothing but a picture. Whistler had
no particular interest in photography and thus it demon-
strates the closeness of those who wished photography
to be an art to that of painting and printmaking. It was
his translations from nature that was most copied, along
with some of the compositional and visual devices of the
painter Edgar Degas (1834–1917). The process was pub-
lished by the main French exponent Robert Demachy
(1859–1937) and Linked Ring member Alfred Maskell
in Photo-Aquatint, or the Gum Bichromate Process
(London, 1897), and by Demachy in ‘The gum bichro-
mate process,’ The Photographic Journal (28.04.1898).
The Pictorialist High Art Movement was not without its
critics who viciously labelled them “paperstainers,” with
their “precious daubs” signifying only “meretricious
effort.” They were all swept away after the turn of the
century with the emergence in the USA, led by Alfred
Steiglitz, one time fellow Pictorialist, by “Straight”
photography with its backlash to “truth to materials”
using “unmanipulated” negatives, derived from the ear-
lier idea that photography was fundamentally differentGsell, Emile. Angle d’ Une Cour
Interieure de la Grande Pagode.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Gilman Collection, Purchase, The
Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift,
2005 [2005.100.501 (34)] Image ©
The Metropolitan Museum of Art.