Image Source : Museo Camera: Gurugram
The Merriam Webster dictionary defines photography as “the art or process of producing images by the action of radiant energy and especially light on a sensitive surface (as film or an optical sensor)”. However, for many, photography is an art to seize a moment and immortalize it. Despite being associated with modernism, the history of photography dates back to the 1830s when Joseph Nicéphore Niépce invented the first camera- Obscura. Since then, photography has undergone considerable advancements both in terms of technology and perceptions. In the early years, photographers focused on recording sceneries and everyday life through their cameras. Thus, camera was regarded as a scientific tool and photography was professed to document. As this allured many away from the art of painting, photography was derided by painters. By the end of 19th century, a group of photographers sought to end this set notion of photography and accord it its due place in the art world. This was the birth of an art movement we term ‘pictorialism’.
Pictorialism was not merely a movement but an approach to photography that highlighted beauty of composition and tonality rather than capturing the reality. Pictorialism was a derivative of thoughts of Henry Peach Robinson, author of Pictorial Effect in Photography (1869). His endeavors introduced artistic possibilities in photography and separated it as an art form from the limited technical ends to which it had been hitherto applied. The pictorialist perspective caught on as a trend in the late 19th century and held its appeal till the early decades of 20th century. The advocates of this perspective thought themselves as artists whose paintbrush was camera and the photograph their masterpiece. They romanticized the photographs by adding effects of softness, blurring and uplifting the otherwise grim photographs. The photographers added the effects manually at the time of processing the image on a photosensitive support. This is what separated the pictorialists from other schools of photography like that of ‘straight photography’.
‘Straight photography’ or ‘pure photography’ aimed to capture the image as realistically as possible by dwelling on sharpness and lines of the image. They did so by extending the potentials of the camera and stuck to conventional means of processing the photographs. Their objective was to keep photographs as distinct as possible from other art forms, specifically, paintings. The pictorialists, on the other hand, chose rather unconventional methods of developing photographs by incorporating chemicals like ‘gum bichromate’. The use of multiple layers of chemicals gave an effect similar to a water color painting. Another chemical that was used at time of processing was ‘gum bromoil’ that allowed photographers to selectively lighten some areas of the image while keeping the dark areas intact. Unlike straight photographs, the pictorial photographs held on to essence of paintings within them.
Pictorialism as an art movement moved determinedly towards achieving its ambition, fueled not by the dream of one individual but of many eminent photographers of the period. Peter Henry Emerson was among such photographers who turned out to be influential in last years of the 19th century for American as well as European photographers. He defined the role of aesthetics in photography in his handbook, Naturalistic Photography (1889). Drawing from his ideology, photographers across the globe organized associations and set up exhibitions to showcase the aesthetic potentials of photography. The Linked Ring in Britain, the Photo Club of Paris, the Kleeblatt in Germany and Austria and the Photo Secession in the United States promoted photography as an art form.
Another prominent personality in this movement who emerged as one of the most important figures at the turn of century was Alfred Stieglitz- a photographer, art dealer, publisher and writer by profession. His works integrated natural elements like rain, snow and steam to elevate the visual appeal of a simple set up. His major works included The Steerage, The Hand of Man, Two Towers-New York, and The Flatiron, among many others. Alfred Stieglitz, along with the likes of Edward Steichen and Clarence White, played a vital role in escalating this movement on to a bigger platform. They started a successive movement of their own- ‘photo secession’- which reiterated that the way a painter handled the canvas and the colours to create his subjective expression, similarly the photographer is entitled to the imaginative use of his equipment and chemicals to produce a unique impression beyond and greater than the object. Some exponents of the secession branch of pictorialism in the United States and Europe were Julia Margaret Cameron, Robert Demachy, Adolf de Meyer, Gertrude Käsebier, and Heinrich Kühn producing works that emulated modernist paintings and charcoal drawings. As a result of their efforts, it can be said that photography was raised to the status of an autonomous art that set base for sale of photographs as works of art.
The objectives and results of pictorialism were so seductive that they crossed frontiers to enthuse photographers from parts of Asia as well. One such example was that of Shapoor Bhedwar, a Parsi cricketer, inventor and photographer. Following the pictorialist school of photography, he excelled in juxtaposing religious motifs against the secular. While the other photographers in India followed rather conventional European schools of photography, the pictorialist aesthetics made the works of Bhedwar stand out as experimental and narratorial. One of his admirable photographs is The Voice of Silence.
The impact of pictorialism was such that despite being overtaken by modernism and new technology, it never really vanished entirely. There were few photographers like Adolf Fassbender who believed in keeping pictorialism alive because it was based on universal beauty. He insisted, “There is no solution in trying to eradicate pictorialism for one would then have to destroy idealism, sentiment and all sense of art and beauty.” A new group of photographers emerged by the end of 1920s who called themselves ‘neo-pictorialists’. They maintained the visually evocative core of their predecessors not to claim an artistic recognition for photography but to save photography from becoming an over-used mass production medium that churned reels and reels of thoughtless images. Neo-pictorialists exerted to make a photograph machine-made as well as human-made at the same time. The school of pictorialism thus reinvented in the 1960s and later was apparent in works of digital imagery. Despite losing its influence in the mid 20th century, the art movement was successful in achieving the ends that it desired. It not only encapsulates for photography aficionados today the perennial quest of photography to be validated as an art form, but is also a very significant link in the evolutionary stages of the technology and philosophy of producing a tour de force photograph.