The international movement of Pictorialism (in
Germany, also called ‘‘Kunstfotografie’’ or ‘‘Bild-
hafte Fotografie’’) as it predated the Photo Seces-
sion, however, began with presentations at the
Vienna Trifolium in 1891 and the Linked Ring in
London in 1892 Through publications and portfo-
lio exchanges and numerous international salons,
especially those in the United States in which
photographers from Europe and later Japan were
represented, they contributed significantly to the
promulgation of Pictorialism and to its establish-
ment as a standard for ambitious photographers.
The exhibitionThe New School of American Photo-
graphyorganized by leading Pictorialist F. Holland
Day of Boston, which appeared in London in 1900
and Paris in 1901, was of seminal importance.
A major impetus for the development of Pictori-
alism, however, was the drastically increasing num-
ber of snapshots by amateurs and the widespread
use of photography in commercial and industrial
applications. Pictorialism—especially in its use of
the more challenging print processes—was a means
of differentiating those with higher aspirations in
the field, and was cultivated equally by professional
photographers as well as by committed amateurs,
including a surprisingly large number of women. By
aligning themselves with the aspirations of contem-
porary movements in painting, the Pictorialists
were able to make the point that they were practi-
cing a fine art in photography. Early influences
from painting included the Barbizon School,
which idealized the simple life of the countryside
and villages, Japanese art, with its atmospheric
effects and flattening of the image, and Impression-
ism, which looked for subtle effects of color and
light, and later Symbolism and the Nabi painters,
and specifically in the United States, the work of
James McNeill Whistler and the Tonalists. Some-
what paradoxically, in producing photographs that
looked more like paintings and etchings or draw-
ings, the Pictorialists indicated that photography
could be a fine art only if it mimicked the accepted
fine-arts mediums rather than by expanding the
notion of what art could be as later happened with
Modernism. Even so, rigidly confined stylistic
approaches that mimicked old masters such as
Rembrandt (e.g., by cabro prints) were controver-
sial even within Pictorialism.
By 1905 Pictorialism was the dominant style and
had begun to be influenced by the newly emerging
abstraction in painting and the graphic arts. Dema-
chy’s gum bichromate prints suggest red chalk
paintings and the hatching methods of applying
the photographic emulsion of Frank Eugene suggest
the dissolving of figure and ground so typical of the
avant-garde painting styles of the day. The increas-
ing sophistication of techniques to manipulate prints
in laboratories allowed increased ‘‘artistic’’ effects to
be produced. The soft-focus determined the graphic
interpretation of lines, light, and shade, shaped by
the emotionally-laden motive of the photographer.
Landscapes, (later even city-landscapes), portraits,
and genre-representations continued to be preferred
themes. Photographs that simply ‘‘reproduced’’
were loathed. As well, each print was handled as if
it were an original, subverting the natural ability of
the medium to create many identical copies and
prefiguring the much later Postmodern predilection.
Above all, the Pictorialists valued the material
beauty of their pictures, which increased the incen-
tive to make their ‘‘photo object’’ into a work of art.
The artistic value of a photograph was often mea-
sured by the quality of the craftsmanship, which
guaranteed the finished picture had not only beauty
but permanency. The family of pigment processes
that were developed from the 1850s onward, in
which the final image is rendered in pigments, was
particularly popular among the Pictorialists because
of their resemblance to traditional artistic media and
the different ways they could be altered by hand-
work on their surfaces. This means made possible an
unrestricted range of coloration and a wide scale of
tone values. Favored techniques included Auto-
chrome (a colored transparent image on glass, simi-
lar to a slide, patented in 1903), bromoil prints and
oil pigment prints (related to the gum bichromate
process, used from 1907 into the 1930s), and gum
bichromate prints (introduced in 1894 and popular
into the late 1920s).
Another important aspect of Pictorialism was the
development of an art market for photography,
although this occurred primarily in America. This
was achieved by stressing the artistic significance of
the works and creating a demand for them by means
of the vigorous debate that swirled around the ques-
tions of artistic truth as well as by highlighting each
work’s individuality and thus collectibility as a
unique object. Stieglitz led the way, declaring that
photography was an art medium that primarily
stood to serve the spirit and the intellect. In the
final analysis, the meaning could neither be found
in the camera, nor in a specific technique, nor in a
laboratory process, rather in the purpose—the
intention—of the photographer; he may use every
available resource and method to accomplish his
objective. For the time being, Stieglitz continued to
defend the mimicking of painterly styles.
However it was also Stieglitz who, from 1910 on,
increasingly attempted to free photography from its
obsession with paintings. He wanted a return of thePICTORIALISM