1130
actuality, and combining or altering negatives in the
darkroom. The leader of this group was Henry Peach
Robinson, but he died in 1901, and then the chief expo-
nents of such practices included such different stylists
as Lydall Sawyer, Alfred Horsley Hinton, and Francis
James Mortimer. Nature could also be improved by us-
ing one of a number of oil pigment processes, such as
the gum print, which were invented and improved upon
in the fi rst years of the 20th century. These enabled such
different photographers as Robert Demachy, Dudley
Johnston, Leonard Misonne, and Edward Steichen to
use a brush to coat the paper with oil pigment. They
applied as much pigment as they liked to make images
that were varied in draughtmanship and rich in color,
often looking like lithographs. Opponents of those
“handwork” methods referred to such images disparag-
ingly as “fuzzygraphs.”
The opponents of “handwork” also believed that art
resided in nature but thought that true artists should be
able to see the composition before them in the ground-
glass screen of their camera. They advocated “straight”
or “pure” photography, with the minimum of darkroom
interference. Since the 1880s, the leading proponent of
“pure” photography was Emerson, who never joined
any of the secessionist art societies but was extremely
infl uential. He claimed that the mass market was spoil-
ing photography, declaring the order of rank for picto-
rial representation to be oil paintings fi rst, followed
by photogravures and fi nally “a good photograph, one
which is a picture, and which is printed in platinotype.”
Emerson’s ideas were carried forward by Stieglitz and
many other pictorialists, including Frederick H. Evans,
George Davison, and Alvin Langdon Coburn. These
photographers liked to make platinum prints, which had
a metallic sheen, or photogravures, which could look
like engravings or etchings.
Arguments between the “pure” and “handwork”
camps helped to destroy late pictorialism, but other
factors were involved. In addition to the squabbles
among its advocates, pictorialism was already in a weak
position. With some justifi cation, the death of pictorial-
ism as a form of modern art stems from its politeness.
Consistently, pictorialism is consigned to the margins
because of its attachment to the drawing-room values
seen in the art of the late Victorians and Edwardians.
Its advocates wrote dull appreciations according to in-
creasingly old-fashioned formula. However, pictorialism
continued to fl ourish in camera clubs and international
exhibitions because it was pleasant and not too modern.
Its popularity increased in the clubs because it helped
produce an idealized or improved view of a utilitarian
or mechanized world. Of course, once pictorialism be-
came popular, its appeal to the famous fi n de siècle art
photographers ended.
Pictorialism suffered even more when one of its
methods, combination printing, was put to new use—
but not in art. When it was dangerous or forbidden
to use a camera outdoors during wartime, combina-
tion printing was widely used to fake war scenes that
were useful propaganda; no doubt that contributed
to pictorialism’s sudden demise in depicting truth to
nature after 1918.
The more pressing problem by 1910, however, was
that pictorial aesthetics seemed outdated. The Victorian
ideals, the comfortable drawing-room life, which is so
evident in Edwardian pictorial photography, were no
longer the appropriate style for art as modernism gained
ground in Europe. Fin de siècle art movements were
brushed aside by modernism; optimism based on eternal
values was destroyed as mechanization took command.
The conserving arts gave way to the explosive forward
movement of the avant-garde. Pictorialism could not
stand the blast of modernism in the guise of Cubism,
Futurism, abstraction, Neo-classicism, New Realism,
and Surrealism.
Despite its elitist claims as an art form, the picto-
rialists’ grasp of contemporary art trends was always
tenuous, even before 1910. Pictorialism was never
avant-garde when compared with current movements
in Fine Art. It was always behind the times. When it
seemed to be getting abreast of the times, as in Alvin
Langdon Coburn’s Futurist-inspired “Vortographs,”
exhibited in London in 1917, or in Paul Strand’s Cubist-
inspired work published in the last issue of Stieglitz’s
Camera Work in 1917, it was vilifi ed by most pictori-
alists. Coburn retired from photography and Camera
Wo r k folded—though Steiglitz and Strand went on to
make enormous contributions to art photography out-
side pictorialism. The reputations of these men have
remained high not so much for their contribution to
pictorialism, considerable as that was (especially from
Stieglitz and Coburn), but because of their dedication
to the elitist, exclusive nature of art photography. As
soon as pictorialism became common fare, a way of
making pictures that any enthusiast could enjoy, it was
of no interest to the elitists. Once it had failed to keep
its distance from the mass of amateurs, pictorialism
could no longer fulfi ll its ambition to be art, because
art by defi nition was made by and for the few, and not
by or for the multitude.
John Taylor
See also: Stieglitz, Alfred; Demachy, (Léon) Robert;
and Brotherhood of the Linked Ring.Further Reading
Anderson, A.J., Artistic Side of Photography in Theory and
Practice, London: Stanley Paul and Co., 1910.