81
including salted paper (Lyonel Clark. Linked Ring), gum
prints (Robert Demachy) and brush-developed platinum
prints (Joseph T. Keiley). In the late 1880s and 1890s,
home-made recipes were used for both new and old pro-
cesses: the photographic press printed formulas for gela-
tin silver papers some years before manufacturers had
perfected them, while calotypes and salted silver papers
were championed in opposition to mass-produced mate-
rials. In photography, as in the decorative arts, there was
a reaction against mechanization and industrialization,
and a concurrent interest in a pre-industrial, artisanal
tradition. Pinhole apertures and single lenses appealed
to a similar nostalgia; in the 1890s, periodicals carried
fond reminiscences of photographing with a spectacle
lens set into a coffee canister or a tea tin.
Yet there was also a belief that the material qualities
of a photograph were overemphasized. In 1891, Alfred
Maskell argued for intentionality: “We are told that the
photographer uses an unintelligent machine. Well—the
brush and the palette, are they intelligent? Of course,
in both cases, the intelligence is, or should be, in the
user” (Maskell 1891, 142). This defended photography
against accusations that it was the automatic product of a
machine, a criticism that cut more deeply with the advent
of snapshot photography. Small, hand-held ‘detective’
cameras and new, ready-sensitized dry plate negatives
required little training or premeditation and photographs
were popularly seen as both instantaneous and unmedi-
ated. While some technical skill was credited to the pho-
tographer, there was no recognition of the more subtle
effects of picture-making: composition, management
of light and shade, tonal control, and diffusion were all
assumed to be inherent to the photograph, captured by
a happy combination of luck and timing.
Maskell’s argument also derived from a notion of
art as founded on idea—intelligence or thought—over
medium and materials, and he paraphrased the painter
James McNeill Whistler’s proposition that the fi nished
work of art should not be dominated by the material
properties of its production, because these distracted
the beholder and undermined a full engagement with
the work. This perspective also contributed to the debate
about manipulated photographs and truthfulness. While
‘hand-work’ was key to the complicated pictorialist
techniques that refuted photography’s reproducibility,
it was also associated with the extensive retouching
practised by commercial portrait photographers, and
condemned on principle by many, including Peter Henry
Emerson and Alfred Stieglitz.
Some believed that, in order to establish photogra-
phy’s claim to art, it was necessary to withdraw from the
practices that served the medium’s commercial viability
and professional base. In the 1890s, this encouraged a re-
jection of the old exhibition classifi cations that grouped
pictures according to technical characteristics, irrespec-
tive of their pictorial intent. The pricing of photographs
was less concerned with process than presentation, size,
and uniqueness: at the 1898 Crystal Palace Exhibition
of the Royal Photographic Society, silver, platinum, car-
bon, and gum prints by photographers such as Frederick
Hollyer, Charles Job, and Charles Constant Puyo were
valued within the same range. There was considerable
attention to presentation: the traditional light-coloured
mounts and gilt frames of mid-century were replaced
by materials largely inspired by the Arts and Crafts em-
phasis on simplicity and unobtrusiveness. Frame shapes
were simple and, like window mounts, often quite deep,
setting the photograph off from its surroundings. This
was a useful device, for until the early twentieth cen-
tury, exhibition walls were crowded. Muted tones had a
more ‘harmonious’ appearance in the exhibition hall, a
prerequisite for taste and sensibility. Frames were made
of stained wood or lightly gilded to a matt fi nish, and
incised ornamentation was recommended for a greater
unity of decorative effect between picture and frame.
In keeping with Art Nouveau and the Jugendstil of the
Vienna Sezession, the motivation was towards the gesa-
mtkunstwerk—the total work of art, integrating tangible
effects with immaterial concerns.
By the turn-of-the-century, pictorialism emphasized
craft and the unique consequence of additive effort in
producing a photographic work of art, individual over
conventional modes of expression, and expressive
rather than mimetic representation. This last aspect
looked ahead to abstraction, for it presupposed sub-
stantial imaginative powers in the photographer and
the viewer. It also addressed the fundamental relation-
ship between photography and pictures; if the medium
simply reproduces reality, then photographic images
are distinguished only in terms of differences in the
subject reproduced and the technical competence of the
reproduction. Pictures, on the other hand, develop out
of representational systems that transcend the common
experience of reality through a material vocabulary and
a perceptual interaction between the photographer, the
object photographed, and the audience for the resulting
photograph as a work of art.
Hope KingsleySee Also: Davison, George; Eastlake, Sir Charles
Lock; Price, William Lake; Robinson, Henry Peach;
Rigby, Lady Elizabeth Eastlake; Multiple Printing,
Combination Printing, and Multiple Exposure;
Rejlander, Oscar Gustav; Genre; Le Gray, Gustave;
Cuvelier, Eugène and Adalbert C.; Fenton, Roger;
Wilson, George Washington; Rau, William H.;
Watkins, Carleton Eugene; Stillman, William James;
Baudelaire, Charles; Calotype and Talbotype; Le
Secq, Henri; Landscape; Sutton, Thomas; Taylor,
John Traill; Lemercier, Lerebours and Bareswill;