PICTORIALISM: AN ARTISTIC REVOLT

Widespread amateur photography was greeted with dismay by photographers who saw their medium as a form of art. A group who became known as pictorialists sought to distinguish their artistic efforts from the snapshots taken by masses of so-called Kodakers. Pictorialists favored specialized (and difficult) darkroom techniques that gave them more control over their results. Some altered images by hand, as for example, Gertrude Käsebier, who softened and blurred parts of photographs during the printing process. American painter Frank Eugene had an even more extreme approach, applying a needle directly to negatives and scratching pencil-like lines or shading around figures. In contrast to snapshots of the time, the compositions of the pictorialists favored simplicity, with broad areas of extreme darks and lights. Most of the pictorialists favored subject matter made popular by impressionist painters: hazy landscapes, nudes, and groups of children gamboling in nature.

There were exceptions, however. American Fred Holland Day gained notoriety for dressing himself as Jesus Christ and acting out biblical stories for his camera. Alfred Stieglitz, a leader of the pictorialist movement, used his camera to capture the urban energy of his native city, New York. His works combined modern subject matter, including ferryboats and airplanes, with the naturalistic style advocated earlier by P. H. Emerson.

In 1902 Stieglitz broke away from the pictorialist movement to found his own elite group of artistic photographers, the Photo-Secession. Several former pictorialists joined him as founding members of the new group, including Käsebier, Clarence White, and Edward Steichen. Stieglitz set up the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (better known as Gallery 291 for its address on New York City’s Fifth Avenue), which was devoted to showing photography as an artistic medium, along with modern painting and sculpture. Stieglitz’s gallery and the Photo-Secession publication Camera Work, which he edited from 1903 to 1917, helped him to become the leading voice in the establishment of a new and more modern aesthetic in photography. Paralleling developments in painting and sculpture, this new aesthetic embraced modern urban and industrial subjects, abstract composition, and a straightforward and unsentimental approach that would come to dominate the practice and criticism of photography in the 20th century.