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declared “Form is henceforth divorced from matter,”
and imagined great libraries of stereographs as future
storehouses of knowledge.
Holmes embraced photography’s technical potential,
and, implicitly, its industrial possibilities. Other writers
(all photographers) began to assert the medium’s status
as art. Paradoxically, this involved emphasis on the
manual making of the photograph, and its uniqueness, in
order to demonstrate the presence of the artist’s imagi-
native intellect in the work. Henry Peach Robinson,
inspired by the work of Oscar Gustav Rejlander, began
making composite photographs in 1857, with a view
to producing fi nished tableaux on a par with academic
painting. Robinson wrote copiously on photography;
his 1869 book Pictorial Effect in Photography is his
defi nitive treatise. It is modeled on the Discourses of Sir
Joshua Reynolds: Robinson largely co-opted Reynolds’
precepts for painters, arguing that the “immutable laws”
of art apply as well to photography as any other medium.
He thus concentrated more on the compositional probity
and completeness of a fi nished work than on the par-
ticularities of photography, although his chapter devoted
to combination printing is a vivid blend of technical
instruction and aesthetic opinion.
Robinson’s book was translated into German and
French, and survived for several editions. It satisfi ed
a void in photographic literature: most art critics who
mentioned photography did so dismissively, and their
comments were generally aimed at painters and print-
makers. Charles Baudelaire’s famous tirade about the
medium in his 1859 Salon is more substantive than
most references to photography, as he proclaimed pho-
tography the antithesis of art and catalogued the good
purposes he could fi nd for the medium, but the passage
was nonetheless written as a prod to painters. Similarly,
Phillipe Burty’s numerous references to photography
were typically foils for his enthusiastic support of
etching and engraving, especially during the etching
revival of the 1860s, which arose in a distinctly anti-
photography climate among painters and reproductive
printmakers.
Baudelaire certainly had Robinson and Rejlander in
mind when he mockingly wrote about the authors of
photographic tableaux “committing a double sacrilege,
and insulting, at one and the same time, the divine art
of painting and the sublime art of the actor.” But Rob-
inson’s staunchest critic was Peter Henry Emerson, his
follower in the paired fi elds of pictorial photography and
photo criticism. Emerson’s brief advocacy of art pho-
tography stemmed from his preference for naturalistic
art; Robinson’s academic compositions and evenly sharp
focus were anathema to him. In his book Naturalistic
Photography (1889), Emerson based his arguments on
modern optics: he contended that photography was the
best medium to approximate actual visual experience,
through its control over focus and tonal range. Differen-
tial focus, and even blurry photographs, were promoted
as means to photographic art.
By 1891 Emerson retracted his claims about art
photography, but his and Robinson’s writings had
contributed much to the Pictorialism movement. Art
photography clubs sprang up in many cities and towns
of the industrial world in the last decades of the nine-
teenth century. Groups communicated with each other
through journals, and photographers met at regional and
international exhibitions. Alfred Stieglitz won a medal—
awarded by Emerson—at one such meeting, sponsored
by the British Amateur Photographic Society in 1887.
Stieglitz recognized that art photography’s legitimacy
would be attained as much through the paraphernalia
of art movements—journals, exhibitions, criticism—as
through photographs. Exhibition reviews became a
staple of the movement, and Pictorialists sought artistic
forebears from early photography. Three “old masters”
emerged: Julia Margaret Cameron, David Octavius Hill,
and Nadar. The critical fortunes of these three had to do
with personal connections—Cameron and Nadar each
had sons who were active photographers who promoted
their parents’ work (Nadar himself lived until 1910).
Hill and Adamson calotypes (Adamson was forgotten at
this time) were collected and disseminated by the Scots
photographer James Craig Annan. The early work was
praised for the primacy given to artistic effect: Annan
wrote about the chiaroscuro in Hill’s calotypes. Cam-
eron was praised in Camera Work for “[realizing] what
few could then appreciate, the diffi culty of dealing with
the critically sharp defi nition of the portrait lens.”
Modern enthusiasm for nineteenth-century photogra-
phy arose in several circles in the 1920s and ‘30s. Nadar,
Cameron, and Hill remained the most widely-known
fi gures from the past. The Surrealists went beyond them,
and embraced virtually all forms of nineteenth-century
photography, as touchstones to Surrealist sensibility.
Pierre Mac Orlan wrote:
Phonograph, photograph, all the graphs, after being
thrown far from delicate, sensitive existences, are re-
instated in the lives of those who marvel at seeing and
hearing. They take a unique revenge in restoring to the
things whose limits they mechanically reproduce the
presence of that universal mystery of which everything
possesses a part that confers on it both its personality and
its interest in the world.
Man Ray discovered the photographs of his neighbor
Eugène Atget (who came to be seen by all of his admir-
ers as a holdover from the previous century), and pub-
lished the most enigmatic of them—window refl ections,
crowds gazing at nothing in view—in La Révolution Sur-
réaliste. Man Ray’s studio assistant, Berenice Abbott,
took Atget’s work to the United States, and his reputation
on a different trajectory. She promoted Atget as the great