Pictorialism

1880s-1920s

Pictorialism came from people who wanted to prove photography as an art form. Pictorialist photographers were heavily influenced by artists of the time and would manipulate their images after to make them look more like art.

To make the photos look more handmade they would use techniques like Vaseline on a camera lens to get a more blurry effect, scratching negatives to create a brush stroke effect and mixing chemicals.

Examples of Pictorialism in photography:

Pictorialism was also the first signs of staged photography, where photographers got models to pose for the image in the way the photographer wanted. Julia Margret Cameron (above) is a prime example of this as she got members of her family to model for her.

Realism/ Straight Photography

Started in 1915

Realism or straight photography came from people who did not like pictorialism and wanted to take photos as they were, no manipulation, providing records of the visual world. Photographers would take photos of shapes and forms, abstract in nature.

Examples of Realism/Straight Photography:

Pictorial photographers did not take photos of the urban environment or rural areas with poor communities. Danish immigrant Jacob Riis published a book ‘How the Other Half Lives’ about the slums and living conditions in Manhattan and this sparked a new kind of realism with a socialist perspective. Photographers Dorothea Lange and Lewis W Hine started to photograph the effects of industrialisation and urbanisation on working class Americans. This new photographic response brought up the issue of housing and labour to legislators and the public , which was the beginning of photojournalism.

Modernism

20th Century

Modernism was a reaction to enlightenment, the new discoveries in technology and science. Technology was improving and there was a clash between science vs religion and more intellect within society. It was also a rejection to realism and a move towards abstract photography and modern times. People were questioning freedom from leaders. Modernism also makes references to the art of the work itself like composition, material, skills and process, it is heavily critiqued and people who admire the art from modernism often look for originality, what makes something unique, seeking for the new.

By the start of the 20th century photography was a way of mass communication, being used in magazines and newspapers and photographs were being used in advertising.

Examples of Modernism in photography:

Post-Modernism

Late 20th Century

Post-modernism was a reaction to modernism and was heavily influenced by what was going on in the world. It started after the impact of the technology in WW2.

A heavy influence to post modernism as a movement is relativism which means no society or culture is more important than another. Not all postmodern artist are relativists but they often explore ideas of the way society is constructed and question traditional hierarchy of cultural values. They also explore power of economic and social forces use that power by manipulating peoples’ identities and cultural identities.

Architects did the most for the start of post-modernism, they rejected the modernist style of architecture as it was too formal and simple. They wanted more playful and dynamic buildings.

The art of postmodernism are admired for the imperfect, accessible and temporary aspects rather than being perfect and technically good like modernism. Postmodernism is more about examining a subject.

Examples of Post-Modernism in photography:

Straight Photography

The term, ‘Straight photography’ was first used in 1904 by critic Sadakichi Hartmann in the magazine, ‘Camera Work’ to describe a more ‘pure’ version of Pictorialism but the movement really began in the 1930s with the decline in popularity of Pictorialism and the rise of the west coast photographic movement. Straight Photography accentuated detail in photos by engaging with the camera’s own technical capability to produce images sharp in focus. Unlike Pictorialism the photos are generally not manipulated but are instead depict the image as the camera and photographer initially sees it. This movement pioneered photographic techniques taken for granted today such as depth of field, focus and use of shutter speed. The photographic society and group of friends f/64 was founded in 1932 as a response to the Pictorial movement and became known for their straight photography specifically surrounding the bay area.

 Ansel Adams was an American photographer and founder of iconic photography group F/64. Adams was renowned for his pure (straight) photography of the American west. Adhering to the conventions of straight photography, his images were sharp and focused. Initially he started his photographic career firmly working to the standards of pictorialism, using methods such as the bromoil process. Adams friend Paul Strand gave him a lot of insight into new methods of straight photography, showing him that using glossy paper over normal would help to intensify tonal values. Straight photography was very important to Group F/64. In their official manifesto it is stated that “Pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form.”

modernism-

Modernism in the arts refers to the rejection of the Victorian era’s traditions and the exploration of industrial-age, real-life issues, and combines a rejection of the past with experimentation, sometimes for political purposes. Stretching from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, Modernism reached its peak in the 1960s; Post-modernism describes the period that followed during the 1960s and 1970s. Post-modernism is a dismissal of the rigidity of Modernism in favor of an “anything goes” approach to subject matter, processes and material.

he shift to modernism can be partly credited to new freedoms enjoyed by artists in the late 1800s. Traditionally, a painter was commissioned by a patron to create a specific work. The late 19th century witnessed many artists capable of seizing more time to pursue subjects in their personal interest.

Modernism reached its peak with Abstract Expressionism, which began in the late 1940s in the United States. Moving away from commonplace subjects and techniques, Abstract Expressionism was known for oversized canvasses and paint splashes that could seem chaotic and arbitrary.

POST-MODERNISM

Post-modernism, as it appeared in the 1970s, is often linked with the philosophical movement Poststructuralism, in which philosophers such as Jacques Derrida proposed that structures within a culture were artificial and could be deconstructed in order to be analyzed.

Post-modern work in the 1970s was sometimes derided as “art for art’s sake,” but it gave rise to the acceptance of a host of new approaches. Among these new forms were Earth art, which creates work on natural landscapes; Performance art; Installation art, which considers an entire space rather than just one piece; Process art, which stressed the making of the work as more important than the outcome; and Video art, as well as movements based around feminist and minority art.

Post-modern art has since become less defined by the form the art takes and more determined by the artist creating the work. American artist Jenny Holzer, who came to prominence in the 1970s with her conceptual art made from language, embodies this model.

modernism and postmodernism were both movements that emerged from an analysis of events within the modern period from the perspective of the values of the Enlightenment.

Pictorialism is an approach to photography that emphasizes beauty of subject matter, tonality, and composition rather than the documentation of reality. This occurred from the 1880s and onwards when photographers strived for photography to be art by trying to make pictures that resemble paintings. Pictorialism has several key features which consist of using substances such as Vaseline on the camera lens to create a blur effect. Additionally another key characteristic is that photographers used to scratch the negatives to manipulate their photographs. Common themes within the style are the use of soft focus, colour tinting, and visible manipulation such as composite images or the addition of brushstrokes. The pictorialism movement led to great innovation in the field of photography with a number of the photographers associated with it responsible for developing new techniques to further their artistic vision. This therefore created the foundations for later advances in colour photography and other technical processes.

Above is a photograph taken by Henry Peach Robinson which represented pictorialism in several ways. This composite print, combining five different negatives, focuses on an intimate scene of a very sick young woman, surrounded by three family members. Robinson pioneered the composite image, which became a foundation of Pictorialism. To his contemporary audience the photograph was controversial, as many felt that photography was too literal a medium to portray such an intimate and painful scene.

Straight photography / Realism emphasizes and engages with the camera’s own technical capability to produce images sharp in focus and rich in detail. The term generally refers to photographs that are not manipulated, either in the taking of the image or by darkroom or digital processes. Paul Strand and Alfred Stieglitz pioneered Straight photography in New York around the 1910s which is still continuing within the current decade. Realism / straight photography continues to define contemporary photographs, while also being the foundation for many relevant others areas of photography. These consist of documentary, street photography, photojournalism and even later progressed to abstract photography. Straight photography is a process and time-based approach. It represents immediacy, the passing of time as in history, or the freezing of time as in a snapshot. In a photograph, time is described by the movements of the subject. Each photographic style adapted the approach to emphasize its own treatment of form, sensory experience, or the changes in the social and cultural environment.

The photograph above was take by Paul Strand who was an American photographer and filmmaker. Although the photograph in which he has taken may come across as simple and minimalistic, it shows a clear close-up view of regular kitchen bowls that are used to study the effects of light and shadows. Paul Strand said that his “abstract” studies were a matter of clarifying “for me what I now refer to as the abstract method, which was first revealed in the paintings of Picasso, Braque, Léger and others… .”

Modernism is when photographers created sharply focused images, with emphasis on formal qualities, exploiting, rather than obscuring the camera as an essentially mechanical and technological tool. Modern Photography encompassed trends in the medium from the early 1900s through to the 1960s. The move from early photography to Modern Photography is distinguished by a departure from the language and constraints of traditional art, such as painting, and this change in attitude was mirrored by changes in practice. The invention of photography was part of the process of modernization of the means of production that too place during the industrial revolution.

Post-modernism is arose in the second half of the 20th century, and it encompasses a variety of themes. First and foremost, postmodernism builds on the themes and conceptual ideas that began during the modernist period. Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism and was highly influenced by the second world war. postmodernism refers to the state that lacks a central hierarchy and one that is complex, ambiguous and diverse. It also represented a loss in faith in human reason as well as provides a bleak prognosis of the human condition. Overall modernism and postmodernism were both movements that engaged from an analysis of events within the modern period from the perspective of the values of enlightenment.

Pictorialism

Time Period : 1880 – 1920

Key Characteristics/ Methods and Techniques : They wanted to create something that looked like it was hand made and resembled art. Pictorialism reacted against mechanization
and industrialisation. The manipulated images by scratching the negatives to give the images texture, used chemicals on the negatives and put Vaseline on the lenses.

Artists Associated :

Alfred Steglitz

Alphred Stieglitz (January 1, 1864 – July 13, 1946) was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his 50-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz was known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the early part of the 20th century, where he introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S. He was married to painter Georgia O’Keefe

Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron (née Pattle; 11 June 1815 – 26 January 1879) was a British photographer who is considered one of the most important portraitists of the 19th century. She is known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous Victorian men and for illustrative images depicting characters from mythology, Christianity, and literature. She also produced sensitive portraits of women and children.

Realism/ Straight Photography

Time Period : 1900 – 1940 mainly 1930

Key Characteristics/ Methods and Techniques : Straight/ realism photography was based on photographers belief in intrinsic qualities of the photographic medium and how it provided records of the world. The photographers strove tyo make photographic pictures instead of paintings and treated it as something away from drawing or painting. Realism was linked to the idea of photography growing up with a close relationship to reality and the ability of the camera to record a moment in time from the real world. The way a photo was taken shows the way the photographer looked at the world and why they chose to photograph it

Artists Associated :

Paul Strand

Paul Strand (October 16, 1890 – March 31, 1976) was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. In the 1930s, he helped found the Photo League. His diverse body of work, spanning six decades, covers numerous genres and subjects throughout the Americas, Europe, and Africa.

Walker Evans

Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans’s work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8×10-inch (200×250 mm) view camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are “literate, authoritative, transcendent”. He is also credited as one of the leading American documentary photographers of the 20th century.

Modernism

Time Period: Early 1900’s – late 1960’s

Key Characteristics/ Methods and Techniques: Early modernity is characterised intellectually by a belief that science could save the world and that, through reason, a foundation of universal truths could be established. The common trend was to seek answers to fundamental questions about the nature of art and human experience. Modernity imbue all aspects of society and are apparent in its cultural forms including fiction, architecture, painting, popular culture, photography. By the beginning of the 20th century, with the diffusion of illustrated magazines and newspapers, photography was a masscommunication medium. Photojournalism acquired authority and glamour, and document like photographs were used in advertising as symbols of modernity

Artists Associated:

Margaret Bourke-White (1904-71)

Margaret Bourke-White (June 14, 1904 – August 27, 1971), an American photographer and documentary photographer, became arguably best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet industry under the Soviets’ five-year plan, as the first American female war photojournalist, and for having one of her photographs (on the construction of Fort Peck Dam) on the cover of the first issue of Life magazine.

Ansel Adams

Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating “pure” photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph

Post Modernism

Time Period: second half of 20th century

Key Characteristics/ Methods and Techniques: Post Modernism was created by the criticism of the international style of modernist architecture. They criticized it for being too formal, austere and functional. Postmodern architects felt that international style had become a repressive orthodoxy. It had been adopted by the corporate world and exploited at the expense of its social vision. Postmodernist architecture uses more eclectic (various) materials and styles with greater playfulness. Parody of earlier styles is a dominant postmodern trait. Another is the refusal to develop comprehensive theories about art, architecture and social progress.

Artists Associated:

Jeff Wall

Jeffrey Wall (born September 29, 1946) is a Canadian artist best known for his large-scale back-lit Cibachrome photographs and art history writing. Early in his career, he helped define the Vancouver School and he has published essays on the work of his colleagues and fellow Vancouverites Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, and Ian Wallace. His photographic tableaux often take Vancouver’s mixture of natural beauty, urban decay, and postmodern and industrial featurelessness as their backdrop.

Sam Taylor-Wood

Samantha Louise Taylor-Johnson( Taylor-Wood; 4 March 1967) is a British filmmaker and photographer. Her directorial feature film debut was 2009’s Nowhere Boy, a film based on the childhood experiences of the Beatles songwriter and singer John Lennon. She is one of a group of artists known as the Young British Artists.

Pictorialism

Pictorialism was a popular art/aesthetic movement beginning around 1869, developing from Henry Peach Robinson’s book Pictorial Effect in Photography: Being Hints on Composition and Chiaroscuro for Photographers. The book focused on ideas of chiaroscuro, the ancient Italian practise of using dramatic lighting to convey mood, similar to the literary device pathetic fallacy. Photographers following the movement would often use pictorial techniques to alter and distort the images they took creating the basis of what we now digitally use as photoshop.

• Bromoil process: This is a variant on the oil print process that allows a print to be enlarged. In this process a regular silver gelatin print is made, then bleached in a solution of potassium bichromate. This hardens the surface of the print and allows ink to stick to it. Both the lighter and darker areas of a bromoil print may be manipulated, providing a broader tonal range than an oil print.
• Carbon print: This is an extremely delicate print made by coating tissue paper with potassium bichromate, carbon black or another pigment and gelatin. Carbon prints can provide extraordinary detail and are among the most permanent of all photographic prints. Due to the stability of the paper both before and after processing, carbon printing tissue was one of the earliest commercially made photographic products.
• Cyanotype: One of the earliest photographic processes, cyanotypes experienced a brief renewal when pictorialists experimented with their deep blue color tones. The color came from coating paper with light-sensitive iron salts.
• Gum bichromate: One of the pictorialists’ favorites, these prints were made by applying gum arabic, potassium bichromate and one or more artist’s colored pigments to paper. This sensitized solution slowly hardens where light strikes it, and these areas remain pliable for several hours. The photographer had a great deal of control by varying the mixture of the solution, allowing a shorter or longer exposure and by brushing or rubbing the pigmented areas after exposure.
• Oil print process: Made by applying greasy inks to paper coated with a solution of gum bichromate and gelatin. When exposed through a negative, the gum-gelatin hardens where light strikes it while unexposed areas remain soft. Artist’s inks are then applied by brush, and the inks adhere only to the hardened areas. Through this process a photographer can manipulate the lighter areas of a gum print while the darker areas remain stable. An oil print cannot be enlarged since it has to be in direct contact with the negative.
• Platinum print: Platinum prints require a two-steps process. First, paper is sensitized with iron salts and exposed in contact with a negative until a faint image is formed. Then the paper is chemically developed in a process that replaces the iron salts with platinum. This produces an image with a very wide range of tones, each intensely realized.

The images were often of people but not natural and usual always staged. The movement connotes the era of the romantics but with a focus on people rather than nature.

Pictorialist Photographers

Wayne Albee, famous for his portraits of iconic prima ballerina Anna Pavlova was a key figure in the pictorial movement. Considering the blurry soft look of this portrait, it is likely Albee used a visual technique of either applying vasine to his camera lens or perhaps the oil print process explained above

Pierre Dubreuil was a key individual of the Pictorialism movement, embracing the technical effects that many classic artists and photographers criticised. His work was much forgotten about until the late 1970s when Californian collector Tom Jacobson discovered his work and set out to collect the photographers remaining work which was unfortunate mostly destroyed in bombings in Belgium during the second world war. Jacobson later produced widely successful exhibitions on Dubreuil, successfully re-introducing him to the photographic world and making him a celebrated and esteemed photographer. Le Figaro, praised Jacobson’s exhibition at the prestigious Musee National d’Art Moderne, acknowledging him for discovering “this treasure which was believed to have been lost.”^[5]