photographers were known as the Pictorialists. Not-
withstanding their individual disagreements, from a
theoretical perspective the Pictorialists were united
in their belief that subjectivity could be added to
photography only by invoking techniques foreign
to what can be regarded as the essential nature of
photography. This Pictorialist theoretical approach
would, however, turn out not to be the dominant
approach in the twentieth century, and would
quickly be replaced by one antithetical in spirit.
Eastlake’s Challenge, Straight Photography, and
Strand’s Solution
By the beginning of the twentieth century the
modernist movement in art had expanded to
require not only subjective self-expression, but
self-expression in a way that utilized qualities
unique to the chosen medium. In the case of photo-
graphy this meant that sharpness, infinite tonal
gradation, the inclusion of incidental detail, wedd-
edness to actual subject matter, and, above all,
objectivity—all the qualities that set photography
apart from painting—had to be emphasized, not
suppressed. This new aspect of modernism led to
the movement known as straight photography,
which dominated photographic theory and practice
for at least the next 50 years.
Eastlake’s challenge presented itself to the straight
photographers in a particularly virulent form. In
order for photography to be a potential art form it
needed to be shown not only that the process could
allow for subjectivity, but also that it could do so on
its own objective terms, an apparent contradiction.
It was the photographer Paul Strand who pointed
to a way around the problem. Strand acknowledged
that in straight photography the mapping of aspects
of the scene before the camera into shapes and tones
on the photographic image is largely, if not wholly
objective, but pointed out that there are other fea-
tures of a photograph that are well within the con-
trol of a photographer wishing to engage in
subjective self- expression, most notably composi-
tion. Prior to Strand, photographers had been
aware of the importance of composition to their
images, but the kind of composition relied upon
was that familiar from traditional painting. A look
at photographs by late nineteenth-century lumin-
aries such as Talbot, Cameron, Robinson, Emer-
son, and Stieglitz reveals subjects that are clearly
defined and centered in the image, and edges that
are treated largely as nuisances away from which
the viewer’s attention is best drawn. With the
photographs of Strand, however, it becomes less
immediately apparent what the photographs are
centrally about, and edges become jarring as they
bisect buildings and people in ways that express a
highly personal understanding of the world.
Strand’s idea was enormously influential. Stie-
glitz devoted the final issue of his important serial
publicationCamera Workto Strand’s images, and
Strand’s influence can be seen in the photographs
made by Stieglitz himself after about 1918. Edward
Weston’s work from the 1920s and later uses com-
position as an aid in self-expression, although in
Weston’s case as often as not the unique composi-
tions are the product of arranging prosaic objects
(shells, vegetables, etc) in relation to the camera,
rather than the camera in relation to the objects.
Over the course of the next several decades
photographers adopted a variety of approaches to
adding subjective elements to their otherwise objec-
tive photographs, ways that went beyond Strand’s
use of composition and Weston’s arrangement of
subject matter. By the 1950s, for example, the
‘‘snapshot aesthetic’’ emerged, most notably in
the work of Robert Frank and then later in the
work of Diane Arbus. These photographers
worked within the Strand tradition insofar as they
maintained the objective relation between the scene
and the image, but added subjectivity by incorpor-
ating the ‘‘mistakes’’ common to amateur photo-
graphy. Frank’s images of middle America are
often underexposed, grainy, and involve tilted hor-
izon lines—a litany of amateur mistakes—but in
doing so succeeded in reflecting his bleak assess-
ment of postwar American life. Arbus placed an
electronic flash directly on the lens axis of her
camera—a technicalfaux pasfor most professional
photographers—and in doing so illuminated her
subjects in a way that revealed the fundamental
vulnerability she saw in her subjects and, by exten-
sion, in all people, herself included.Variations on Strand’s Solution: Photographing the
Immaterial
The optical-chemical process of photography is
by nature wedded to the material, a fact that leaves
the photographer who wants to depict immaterial
subjects such as the mental or the spiritual in a
difficult position. This is especially so for a photo-
grapher working in the tradition of straight photo-
graphy, as the very characteristics that are unique
to the medium are ones that tend to wed the depic-
tive content of photographs to what was before the
lens at the time of exposure. The only apparent
solution involves the use of metaphor. While the
photographer must in the first instance photograph
a material object, he or she can use a variety ofPHOTOGRAPHIC THEORY