Context of Practice: Pictorialism in Photography 1885-1917 (Lesson Notes)

Notes made in Lesson:

“Photography – A Cultural History” – By Warner – detailed timeline

• “Pictorialism” – a style/approach to photography, a way of referring to photography.
• 1885-1917: just after early Victorian Photography.
• Peter Henry Emerson: Medical/Scientifically trained, writes “Naturalistic Photography” in 1889 which promoted photography as a cutting edge application of science.
• Then “The Death of Naturalistic Photography” in 1890 which rejected his early ideas in favour of the individuality of the artist.
• Science and Art come together quite often.
• “Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, 1886” –Emerson – Rural documentation images exploring how the camera and eye perceive surroundings.

• Basing composition of these images on paintings such as Millais’s “L’Angelus” 1857-1859.

• “The Golden Section” – The harmonic composition of where the divide is between the landscape and the sky.
• John Everett Millais’s, Ophelia 1851-2 (Best known illustration from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.) – The Shape of the image has a religious style of framing, almost like the art found above an alter.

• Julia Margaret Cameron (LOOK UP) : Blur created through both long exposures, when the subject moved and by leaving the lend intentionally out of focus. Photographer of celebrities between 1864-1875.
• Ethereal characters through the style of “soft” imagery.
• Wistful expressions – Romanticism.
• Impressionism 1870’s/80s: “Hay Harvest”, Pissarro, 1901.

• The idea of a “snapshot” influencing painters at the time from photography.
• “Camera Work Magazine” : Photographic Journal published 1903-1917 by Alfred Steiglitz (with Steichen).
• Featured high quality photographs printed from copper plates.
• Photo Succession:
• Pictorialist Group by Steiglitz in 1902-1910.
• Showed in small galleries eg. 291 in New York with painters eg. Picasso.
• “a body of artists comprising the most advanced and gifted men of their times...broken away from the narrow rules of custom and tradition...”
• (Fritz Matthies- Masnten from the catalogue for Munich exhibition)
• Edward Steichen, “ Self Portrait” 1903.

• Robert Demachy, “Struggle” 1904.

• (Demachy) revival of the gum bichromate process – allows to work colour and brushwork into the photographic image. – The orange pigment in this print is meant to evoke sanguine,  reddish chalk often used in life drawing.
• “The Linked King” – 1892-1909: -British Pictorialist Photographers such as founder Henry Peach Robinson. – Its logo was three interlinked rings which were meant in part to represent the Masonic beliefs of Good, True, and Beautiful.
• H.P. Robinson, “ Fading Away” 1858. – Evokes a narrative, atmosphere and mood very morbid – weather outside of the window is dark and full of pathetic fallacy. Figure who is dying is all in white giving her a heavenly, angelic feel. – MELODRAMA – Victorian fashion. Technically quite a balanced image compositionally. Lighting balances dark and light, almost a spotlight on the figure caused by the natural light from the window, - eye is drawn to the figure.

• The Image is separately composed, each figure taken individually – A composite negative.
• Death & Childhood a very important theme for Victorian Society.
• Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, “ Herdsman tending cows.” – Whitby Abbey. 1875 -1910; does various images from Whitby.
• Paul Strand, “ White Fence” 1916. – Strand shunned the soft focus and symbolic content of the Pictorialists and instead strived to create a new vision that found beauty in the clear lines and forms of ordinary objects.

• This image sums up the beginning of “Modernism”.


KEY FEATURES:

• Subjects/themes: often rural – relationship between land and people.
• The Nude/Still Life/Portraiture.
• Visual Language: Soft focus, sepia toning, “painterly” effects like textured papers and drawing onto the surface.