Pictorialism
Photography
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Pictorialism
Pictorialism was a photography style that became important in the last two decades of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century.
The first thing we can notice in a pictorialistic photograph is that it is dominated by a “poetic atmosphere.” An atmosphere where the image is blurred, there is a soft focus. It is called the “flou effect.”
A couple of decades before, the photographers/artists differentiated themselves from the simple technicians with academic photography, a type of photography with a complex, pretentious composition. At that time, the Kodak camera —quite simple to use— became popular, and the developing and copying were done in industrial laboratories. So the artists needed to differ from the amateurs with another type of artistic attitude: it was not about portraying an image of nature but about giving it an “emotional interpretation.” It was about adding emotion to that image, “giving it a poetic atmosphere.”
Effects such as vague shapes, blurring, chiaroscuro, and dim luminosity —achieved by means of soft focus, filters, and screens— were used to generate those emotions.
We can say that there is a romantic search and an exaltation of emotions. And beauty is usually accompanied by a certain melancholy, a certain touch of sadness.
In short, photographers did not record a landscape or a scene in a simple and somehow “objective” way, but imposed their own look to obtain a unique image, with a unique appearance (by manipulating luminosity and focus, for example), so as to elicit a different emotional response in the observer. It is an example that describes the process of photography becoming an art and also describes what art is in general.
Technique has taken a back seat; the protagonist is now the photographer’s sensibility. A photograph is not what the camera registers; it is now the artist’s gaze.
Representative photographers: Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz (before becoming one of the fathers of straight photography), Léonard Misonne, George Davidson, Constant Puyo, Alvin Lagdon Coburn, Robert Demachy.
Image: photography taken by Léonard Misonne, (1870-1943)
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