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PICTORIALISM
Pictorialism was the vanguard movement in art pho-
tography from about 1891 to 1910. It was especially
strong among photographers in the United States and
Europe who established their reputations in an orga-
nized international movement. They banded together
to establish photographic processes as art. The work of
camera, composition and printing served related artistic
ideals: the ascendancy of the individual over the mass,
the emergence of the artist from the crowd and the value
of scarcity.
Apart from the broad aim to make pictures by pho-
tography, almost nothing else about pictorialism is
straightforward, certainly not its beginning or its end.
The years 1891–1910 may signal the start and fi nish
of the art movement, but not the limits of the everyday
word “pictorial.” This is partly a problem of terms: pic-
torialism was an end-of-century organized movement,
whereas the word “pictorial” had been in general use in
the 1860s and simply meant looking like a picture. In
the 1890s art photographers who wanted to demonstrate
their modernity turned “pictorial” into a contemporary
artistic ”ism.” However, the arguments that tore the art
movement apart stemmed from the general meaning of
the word “pictorial”—looking like a picture. Increas-
ingly, no one could agree what a picture should look
like. The nature of pictures suddenly became uncertain,
and so did pictorialism.
Henry Peach Robinson described the nature of the
pictorial in photography in the 1860s. He wrote eleven
books on art photography and the most popular, Picto-
rial Effect in Photography, was printed four times from
1869–1893. Pictorial effect was achieved by making
photographs look picturesque, overlaid with the early
19th century individualism of Romanticism and com-
bined with the mid-century fashion for storytelling
pictures. Pictorial effect depended on adapting the
forms and styles of academic painting, including the
architecture or structure of the image. Robinson used
combination printing to build his pictures in the dark-
room, but his interest in Pre-Raphaelite painting and its
patchwork of parts meant that the space in his fi nished
photographs often looks strange and unrealistic, though
produced by purely photographic means.
In the 1880s Robinson’s piecemeal style was con-
demned by Peter Henry Emerson. Both men believed
that photographic techniques could be used to make art,
though they emphasized different procedures. Emerson
believed that a photograph must be made in the camera
rather than in the darkroom. Ideally, this meant creating
the picture in a single composed shot with no faking and
dodging. Emerson replaced the word “pictorialism” with
“naturalism” which claims to represent the actual world
as it appears before the camera. But Emerson was just
as obsessed as Robinson with art and personal expres-
sion, though the ways of achieving both were changing.
During the 1880s, there was a shift away from anecdotal
pictures, and this is evident in Emerson’s work. Some of
the earliest images published in Life and Landscape on
the Norfolk Broads (1887), such as “The Dame School,”
tell stories, but most of them do not. Emerson gradually
dispensed with content. The late images, published in
Marsh Leaves (1895), are dominated not by subject mat-
ter but how photographs represent light and shade.
By the late 1880s, art photographs were not tied
to storytelling paintings. They could be meaningful
on their own, especially if they were atmospheric,
impressionistic or symbolic. Moreover, what caused
so much experimentation and excitement in the 1890s
was the sheer number of techniques available to turn
photographs into art.
Although the pictorialists needed mass-produced
photographic materials, they pretended to stand apart
from automation, and celebrated hand-work or other
skills. Pictorialists used the best materials available in
the High Street, but disdained the ordinary commercial
or industrial nature of photography. They intended
their photographs to be completely different from the
objectivity sought by scientists and social recorders.
The emphasis was not on utility but on expression.
As artists, they also set out to be utterly different from
snapshooters.
Antony Guest, in his book Art and the Camera
(1907), claimed that the highest aim of every amateur
was to glimpse the “Dream City of Art.” This was the
distant, magic home of the artist, that “gifted being for
whom there is more richness in life than for ordinary
mortals.” To signal that they placed feeling and imagina-
tion over the authority of fact, the pictorialists embraced
soft focus and the evocation of mood. Though engaged
in dreaming, they also knew they had to express this in
new photographic techniques. They became experts in
combining different graphic devices. When art photog-
raphers pictured themselves at work on a print, which
was rarely, it was to demonstrate their skill in precise
and diffi cult processes. Alvin Langdon Coburn photo-
graphed himself working at an etching press, and John
Cimon Warburg pictured himself working on the oil
pigment of a gum print.
The pictorialists’ program was romantic-expressive.
It was concerned with identifying and staying close to
the supposedly eternal standards of nature, beauty and
truth. It was optimistic about the world it surveyed and
wished to conserve. However, by 1908 the pictorialists
were in open confl ict about the nature of their art. The
movement began to break up, signalled by the collapse
of the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring in London in
- That year, more divisions surfaced in the United
States. Alfred Stieglitz organized The International
Exhibition of Pictorial Photography in Buffalo, New
PICTORIALISM
