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]

A form of photography has existed since almost the beginning of human existence. It has been theorised that as far back as 500BCE small holes in tents or animal skins created a photographic effect that inspired Palaeolithic cave paintings. Written records of a ‘pinhole camera’ first appeared in 4BCE in the Chinese text ‘Mozi’ edsciribing a ‘Treasure House’ inverted by a pinhole to collect light and produce an image. In 1502, in his book ‘Codex Anticulous’ Leonardo da Vinci gave the clearest and most concise description of a camera since it’s initial conception as an idea, writing “If the façade of a building, or a place, or a landscape is illuminated by the sun and a small hole is drilled in the wall of a room in a building facing this, which is not directly lighted by the sun, then all objects illuminated by the sun will send their images through this aperture and will appear, upside down, on the wall facing the hole. You will catch these pictures on a piece of white paper, which placed vertically in the room not far from that opening, and you will see all the above-mentioned objects on this paper in their natural shapes or colours, but they will appear smaller and upside down, on account of crossing of the rays at that aperture. If these pictures originate from a place which is illuminated by the sun, they will appear coloured on the paper exactly as they are. The paper should be very thin and must be viewed from the back.” It wasn’t until 1604 that the name Camera Obscura was used in conjunction with this invention, appearing in Johannes Kepler’s book Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena. The camera was initially used to study eclipses without exposing the eyes to the suns harsh and damaging rays but progressed to use as a drawing aid, producing incredibly accurate depiction which could easily achieve graphical perspective. Obviously all of these images were fleeting and were not fixed to material. It would take thousands of years from the conception of the cameras theory for the ability for photographers to fix the shadows.

Thomas Wedgwood is credited as being the ‘First Photographer’ being the first person known to have thought of creating permanent pictures by capturing camera images on material coated with a light-sensitive chemical. He was not successful in making permanent pictures but was able to produce shadowed photograms that was a scientific breakthrough and paved the way for his successors Daguerre and Talbert.

Photography as we know it was invented in 1939 by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre who created the daguerreotype, a method of fixing an image to a mirror like sliver plated copper. It was the first publicly available photographic process and was widely used in the 1840s/50s. As an academically trained painter Daguerre was particularly interested in creating a spectacle of entertainment which led to the dramatic creation of Daguerreotypes to create an experience rather than just a picture. dram The daguerreotype produced rich and lifelike photographs that were very beautiful however incredibly expensive to create and also were unable to be replicated due to the nature of the materials used. This caused a decline in popularity in the method and led photographers to explore other methods such as Talbert’s.

At the same time as Daguerre, Henry Fox Talbert, an MP, writer and botanist was developing his own method to ‘fix the shadows’. As an artist he was a terrible drawer so was very interested in the theory of photography to allow him to replicate surroundings accurately. His method was a salted paper technique in which paper was made wet with a solution of salt and then, after drying, was brushed on one side with silver nitrate. When exposed to light the paper would darken to produce an image and would then be stabilised by more strong salt. This method was the most effective way of producing photographs and quickly overshadowed Daguerre as the most popular photography process.

Introduced in 1900, the Eastman-Kodak brownie revolutionised photography. The camera sold for a dollar each and quickly brought photography into the home, making photography readily available for amateur photographers and families to document their lives. Initially manufactured for children, the brownie was a major success with all sorts of people, particularly soldiers who took the camera’s into the heart of battle in the first world war, composing historically significant images that are still emotive today. Kodaks marketing campaign “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest” was a great success which encouraged people to take more casual, relaxed photos which brought about happier expressions and smiles, more akin to photography today.

Book in hand: how does it feel? Smell, sniff the paper. It is a hardback book. It smells like a book

Paper and ink: use of different paper/ textures/ colour or B&W or both. There is a slip of loose paper with an image on it. The front is textured and feels like a linen cover

Format, size and orientation: portraiture/ landscape/ square/ A5, A4, A3 / number of pages. Portrait orientation a4 paper. 144 pages with 57 colour photographs

Binding, soft/hard cover. image wrap/dust jacket. perfect binding/saddle stitch/swiss binding/ Japanese stab-binding/ leperello Hard cover with a perfect binding

Cover: linen/ card. graphic/ printed image. embossed/ debossed. letterpress/ silkscreen/hot-stamping. Linen cover with a printed graphic of stitches/ barbed wire and an image of hair and an ear with an earing on the other side

Title: literal or poetic / relevant or intriguing. The title “out of the blue” may reference the idea of something unexpected happening, causing an imbalance to the normality of daily life.

Narrative: what is the story/ subject-matter. How is it told? When looking at the essay in the photo book it is told that it is about a missing person called Suzanne. The story is told by old fashioned photos, images of paper with writing on it, images of old fashioned photos of both her and her parents, images of family items and images of images cut out or covered up referencing that she is not here anymore.

Structure and architecture: how design/ repeating motifs/ or specific features develops a concept or construct a narrative. There is a repeating form of collages of photos partially or completely covered up to reference the disappearance.

Design and layout: image size on pages/ single page, double-spread/ images/ grid, fold- outs/ inserts. The size of images different from page to page as some take up the whole page, half he page or the whole page except a thin white border

Editing and sequencing: selection of images/ juxtaposition of photographs/ editing process. The images all have a retro look to them and the images are chosen to portray a certain message. They start off with an image of a note from the missing person

Images and text: are they linked? Introduction/ essay/ statement by artists or others.  Use of captions (if any.) At first you don’t know what is going on and see images of aerial views of a motorway and an image of a note the contents of which I have written below. Then, images of what appears to be a child’s bedroom and images that have the person cut out of. After reading a slip of paper with the essay on you realise it is about a missing girl. There are also a range of family photos of her covered up by other things to represent her disappearance.

Suzzanne Gloria Lyall

The photobook is about the disappearance of a 20 year old women and how the disappearance has effected the family. The photographer has taken images in different ways which are important in conveying messages. She cuts the missing girl out of old family photos and shows the parents of the girl unsure what they should do without her. The photographer has taken loads of old family photos of her and cut her out or covered her up, and placed all of the images on a big wall with strings attached like a detective case. She then photographed the board bit by bit telling the story of her disappearance.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/article/milestones-photography

The camera obscura was not invented in 1826, the earliest written account is from the 4th century (400BC) by a Chinese philosopher Mo-tzu. He wrote about how light from a illuminated object would pass through a pinhole into a dark room and create an upside down image of the object. The first use was in the 13th century when they used a camera obscura for safe observation of sun eclipse. An astrologer, alchemist and physician Arnaldus de Villa Nova used camera obscura as a projector for entertainment. Artists started using them in the 15th century. Artist and engineer Leonardo da Vinci talks about camera obscura in his book Codex Atlanticus, a twelve-volume bound set of his drawings and writings.

Pictorialism;

Pictorialism first was invented in 1902, however the concept also started to develop in the 1880s and onwards. It was considered an art movement that was the strongest from 1885 to 1915.The key characteristics of pictorialism was putting Vaseline on lens, scratching negatives, mixing chemicals in the dark room, and it was meant to look hand made to make it look like a natural painting. The key idea was to separate photography as an art form from photography used towards various scientific and documentary purposes.

The artists associated were Alfred Stieglitz, Peter Henry Emerson, Julia Margaret Cameron and ” the brotherhood of the linked ring”.

Romanticism was a big influence and “allegorical paintings”, this helped to develop the concept of pictorialism.

The methods/ processes involved were hand-made processes, this was all done to make the images look very similar to paintings and make them look natural with natural manipulation. r Consequently artists would stay focused on the choice of photo papers and chemical procedures capable of enhancing or reducing certain effects. For the same reason, some pictorialists were using special lenses to produce softer images, but the softening of focus during post-processing was certainly the most common practice.  For instance, pictorialists were very fond of using gum bichromate – it was an unusual strategy which involved multiple layers of chemicals and resulted in a painterly image resembling watercolour paintings. Another favourite procedure of pictorialists was an oil print, which was quite useful since it allowed photographers to be selective and manipulate the lighter areas of print while keeping the darker parts intact. Besides these marginalized approaches, pictorialists used to rely on more common yet artistic enough practices, such as cyanotype or platinum print.

REALISM/ STRAIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

Time period; 1915

Key characteristics / conventions; it was meant to show photography as a new modern art, the images were meant to be taken in sharp focus, with no manipulation with a clearly focused camera.  Straight photography is also synonymous with pure photography, since both terms describe the camera’s ability to faithfully reproduce an image of reality.

Straight photography 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, but sharply depict the scene or subject as the camera sees it.

Artists associated; Paul Strand , Edward Western was his inspiration from the previous art movement. “The Steerage”- Alfred Stieglitz then switched to straight photography from pictorialism.

Key works; many artists took inspiration from Picasso, as his paintings were very abstract.

Methods/processes; framing the images.The term generally refers to photographs that are not manipulated, either in the taking of the image or by darkroom or digital processes, but sharply depict the scene or subject as the camera sees it.

Contrast between pictorialist’s and realist’s;

Pictorialists were photographs who typically made on orthomatic dry plates, with emulsion speed at what would be by today’s standards somewhere between ISO 5 and 10. Mood was far more important than sharpness. The lenses used were capable of reasonably sharp results when well stopped down, but often the photographers of the day did not enjoy the advantages of bright light and stable objects so that they were forced to use wider apertures, where lens performance was considerably degraded.

The Realists, in contrast, were dedicated to creating photographs that were as sharp as possible, typically using large format sheet film cameras and very small apertures to maximize depth of field and sharpness. Most, though not all, were landscapes, usually of the American West. The Realists believed photography to be a totally new art form, NOT a tool or technique for prior forms of art.