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photographers attempted to exhibit 350 photographs at
art photography exhibit in Vienna.
More than any other single individual, Alfred Stieg-
litz provided a motivating force for an American art pho-
tography movement. This was further by his assumption
of co-editorship of the American Amateur Photographer
in 1893. At the time this occurred, Stieglitz and several
partners were operating a photoengraving company
which after 1893 supplied a number of halftone re-
productions as illustrations for the American Amateur
Photographer. About 1892, Alfred Stieglitz saw some
prints of size 4 × 5 inches made with a hand camera,
which he found extraordinarily beautiful. Thereupon he
decided to buy a hand camera and master its use. He
made a series of photographs provided photography
and art ‘with a new motive’ as city snow scenes. He
played a major role fi rst in the amalgamation of the
NY societies in 1896 and ultimately in the founding in
1902 of Photo-Secession, the American counterpart to
the Linked Ring.
The best that could be achieved with color photog-
raphy in the nineteenth century was perfected experi-
mentally, or bought to a viable commercial status in the
period 1893 to 1895. Although prints in color could not
be obtained from color negatives or color fi lm in an
ordinary camera, several methods were perfected which
allowed people to view photographs in color on a screen,
and, after 1893, good half-tone illustrations could be
produced in color on a photoengraver’s letterpress.
The choice of which paper to use in making photo-
graphic prints—whether for professional studio work or
for exhibition purposes—remained more of a problem in
the last decade of the nineteenth century than is perhaps
generally recognized. Frequently, it is simple stated
that the old reliable albumen paper was replaced by the
gelatine-bromide papers about 1890.
The fl owering of American fi ne-art photography,
which had begun in a small way after 1890, came to
its fi rst fruition with the staging of an European-style
photographic salon at the Philadelphia Academy of
Fine Arts.
Photography was poised for a coming age of mecha-
nization as the world passed into its twentieth century.
There were by this time 100,000 Kodak cameras alone
in the hands of amateurs making photography easier
and more accessible.
Printers and sculptors discarded traditional methods,
using photographs as preparatory for their compositions.
From 1890 as photographic techniques were radically
simplifi ed an increasing number of artists, painters
or sculptures began to take their own photographs of
models or ask professionals to take shots according to
their instructions.
Pictorialism only represented one part of the artistic
production of the period 1890s. Most photographers
were forced to work to earn a living and so continued
to do journalistic work, in which they reproduced and
documented the real world without trying to fi lter it
through any particular techniques meant to refl ect their
individual artistic vision.
Eugène Atget is of quite a different stature. Between
1898 and 1927, the year of his death, he systematically
roamed Paris documenting every street, which was
destined for destruction in the near future. Thousands
of church facades and townhouses from the Middle
Ages right up to the 18th century were recorded photo-
graphically on an impressive scale. His style and visual
technique were original and innovative as his project.
He was probably well aware of hiss abilities, despite
the fact that he worked more like a simple craftsman
than an artist, selling his work to architects, illustrators
and painters. The Surrealist were the fi rst to draw at-
tention to his work for its artistic merit, by publishing
it in their journals.
The issue of whether or not photography could be
art became an important issue in the early 1890s with
the Secession movement, which was spearheaded in
1893 by the founding in London of the Linked Ring, a
rival group to the renamed Royal Photographic Society
of Great Britain. Seeking a pictorialism independent
of science and technology, the Secessionists steered a
course between academicism and naturalism by imitat-
ing every form of late Romantic art that did not involve
narrative. Equally antithetical to their aims were Realist
and Post-Impressionist painting, at that time at their
zenith. In the group’s approach to photography as art
for art’s sake, the Secession had most in common with
Whistler’s aestheticism. To resolve the dilemma between
art and mechanics, the Secessionists tried to make there
photographs look as much like paintings as possible.
Rather than resorting to composite or multiple images,
however, they exercised total control over the printing
process, chiefl y by adding special materials to their
printing paper to create different effects. Pigmented gum
brushed on coarse drawing paper yielded a warm-toned,
highly textured print that in its way approximated Im-
pressionist painting. Paper impregnated with platinum
salts was especially popular among the Secessionists for
the clear grays in their prints. Their subtlety and depth
lend a remarkable ethereality to Gertrude Käsebier’s
photographs in which spiritual forces are almost visibly
sweeping across the photograph. Through Käsebier and
Alfred Stieglitz the Linked Ring had close ties with
America, where Stieglitz opened his Photo-Secession
gallery in New York in 1902.
Peter Henry Emerson felt the artifi ciality of the
Robinson school, and he put forward another point
of view against the latter’s theories which he named
naturalism, and which he described in his Naturalistic
Photography, fi rst published in 1889. He believed thatHISTORY: 8. 1890s