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BROTHERHOOD OF THE LINKED RING
The Brotherhood of the Linked Ring was an elite inter-
national society founded in London in 1892 to promote
photography as a fi ne art. The style of art photography
then in vogue was known as pictorialism. The Brother-
hood was the fi rst group in England with a vision of
art photography broadly shared with others in Europe
and the USA. The Vienna Camera Club exhibitions
started in 1891 and the salon of the Photo-Club de Paris
was formed in 1894, both groups becoming affi liated
to the Linked Ring by 1895. In the United States, art
photographers in Boston, New York and Philadelphia
invited foreign photographers to their sixth exhibition
in 1893. Crucially, Alfred Stieglitz founded the Photo-
Secessionists in New York in 1902. By then, many of
his group were already in the Brotherhood.
Art photography in Britain, as elsewhere, tended
towards domestic and conventional genre and landscape
subjects, and scarcely recognised contemporary radical
fi ne art movements such as Aestheticism and Symbol-
ism. The determination to stay with gentler subjects
eventually destroyed the Brotherhood in 1908-10, as
it tried and failed to eradicate the infl uence of those
Photo-Secessionsits who did engage with Aestheticism
and Symbolism.
But those battles lay in the future. In the 1890s,
before the Brotherhood existed, the growing interest in
modern art photography in England had little support
from the medium’s oldest institution, the Photographic
Society of London (founded in 1853 and named the
Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain from
1894). Instead of actively supporting art photography,
the Photographic Society had, for most of its existence,
favoured science and technology, and resisted changes
in its art photography salon.
The Brotherhood was formed as a result of a squabble
among members of the Photographic Society over what
pictures to include in the salon. The row took place in
1891 when The Hanging Committee rejected George
Davison’s “The Onion Field” (1889) on the grounds of
late submission. But this was a nit-picking attempt to
sidestep the real issue. The Hanging Committee rejected
“The Onion Field” because it was a soft-focus, impres-
sionistic pin-hole photograph made without a conven-
tional camera and lens. The impressionism and the lack
of technology clashed with the Committee’s established
ideas on art photography, which required beautifully
composed scenes of known subjects and of recognisable
artistic merit in the manner of eternal standards. In their
view, Davison’s work stood for transient and unskilled
whimsy. Davison was a new type of artist—but the die-
hards on the Hanging Committee were either uninter-
ested in modern art photography or were determined to
stop its progress in the Photographic Society.
The vice-president of the Society, Henry Peach Rob-
inson, though not a member of the Hanging Committee,
ensured that Davison’s work was after all given pride of
place. Someone then complained and offi cials removed
the work, insisting that Robinson leave the gallery. Rob-
inson and Davison resigned from the Society and, along
with Ralph Robinson, William Willis, Alfred Horsley
Hinton, Henry Herschel Hay Cameron and nine others,
founded the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring.
The name was derived from the gimmal ring, a
jointed fi nger-ring which could be worn by two people
at the same time, linking hands. The Brotherhood was
deliberately exclusive, and the circle could only in-
crease when existing Links (as members were known)
proposed and unanimously approved new names. The
total number of different Links was 114, though the
estimate for the greatest number in one year is 74 (in
1902). There were about 50 Links when the group
disbanded in 1910.
Apart from membership by invitation, there were few
rules in the Constitution. The Links were held together
by their enthusiasm for pictorialism, which encouraged
individual expression while expecting practitioners to
be familiar with optics, chemistry and the mechanics of
photography. Of course, there was never one single style
of pictorialism and, increasingly, different approaches
divided the fraternity. Though Robinson and Davison
were founding members, their differences summarise
the arguments that eventually wrecked the Brotherhood.
Robinson was the greatest exponent of combination
photography of a moralising or narrative kind, whereas
Davison (despite his pin-hole experiment) preferred to
compose naturalistic scenes in the viewfi nder and print
in photogravure. His opposition to storytelling and
darkroom “faking” made him a natural ally of Alfred
Stieglitz, who became a Link in 1894. The Links agreed
that a photograph was not artistic if (in the words of
Stieglitz) it was technically perfect but pictorially rot-
ten. So although the Links became expert in techniques,
the artistry lay in the evocation of mood rather than the
statement of fact.
Despite the importance of the fi nal effect, the Links
engaged in often bitter disputes over processes. Some
advocated print manipulation in the darkroom while
others believed the photograph should be printed
‘straight,’ insisting on the purity and integrity of the
chemical process. The opposing factions never resolved
the matter in arguments stretching over twenty years
and, from this distance, the differences between them
are less striking than their similar aim: to make rare and
unique prints. This they achieved either through vari-
ous oil pigment processes which enabled them to make
pictures look like lithographs or mezzotints, or through
the use of platinum salts and gravure printing, produc-