Pictorialism Images

[cowanw]

In my opinion, the digital manipulation of images represents the final triumph of Pictorialism over Straight photography, a conflict first started 100 years ago, thought to be over by the 1950's, but simmering until, like a phoenix, it appears again. Sort of the 100 Years war.
Mind you I prefer to think of digital images as more of a graphic art; not to say there hasn't been plenty of graphic art manipulation of analogue photography.
I am enjoying this thread, as I count myself as a pictorialist.

Not to kick a hornets nest, but some of the ideals of form and aesthetics in Sandy's article I can kind of see in some digital prints that rely heavily on a tablet and Corel Painter, or that topaz plug in (don't know which one, never used it). Should that kind of digital image be considered, "pictorial?" I've defended some of those images, as photographs in a local club I belong to because they were at one time a reality, but the process the the photgrapher used changed the reality to add emotion or vision the photographer felt at the time, or about the image. Of course the counter being, that's not what was really there. Mind you most of them shoot color, and man did I get blasted for bringing up interpolation, bayer filters, and the technology that records "reality," you blindly trust your in camera JPEG processing or, software?

bleh, not sure what I'm really asking. I was going to ask about forms, and aesthetic but I got myself confused... if I rerail my thought process I'll add in again..

[Mark MacKenzie]

As an aside, I think it underlines the importance of studying photography. Steichen, Stieglitz, Eliot Porter, Karsh, on and on.

It makes me remember the thread "These I Like." Ken, are you still doing that? Sorry if I haven't visited your page in a while.

[hendrik faure]

photo break:


photogravure (in the box first prints from 1965)

[Emil Schildt]

[QUOTE=hendrik faure;994023]photo break:

QUOTE]

thanks for that (not that the discussion isn't interesting!!)

I LOVE those dead frogs - I have a lot of them...

Great gravure (copper plate?)

[Emil Schildt]

Silly Still...

Painted with light - liquid emulsion.

[Marko Trebusak]

What is interesting to me, is that I can see the fine images, BUT can only imagine what the prints are like. In Russ Young's disertation he wrote, that inability to see what the prints looks like plus the need of amateur photographers for recognition in the form of exhibition awards were two big reasons for the downfall of Pictorialism in the west. Russia was different story, as movemet was beheaded in it's full blossom as "politically incorrect".

So is anything we can do to share and apprichiate this objects of beauty in their inbodied versions? Or are we walking the same path, that leads to the end of the Pictorialism?

Marko

[William Whitaker]

I've posted this image from my home page before, but I think it fits well the overall mood of the pictorialist genre.

[tgtaylor]

The Boat Builders, 1888. Lyddell Sawyer



From a photogravure in Sun Artists, published in 1890. Reproduced in The Linked Ring, Margaret Harker 1979.

Thomas

[hendrik faure]

[QUOTE=gandolfi;994069]

photo break:

QUOTE]

thanks for that (not that the discussion isn't interesting!!)

I LOVE those dead frogs - I have a lot of them...

Great gravure (copper plate?)

Gandolfi, thank you - yes, it is copperplate photogravure. Would be fine for you also.
Do you have more frogs or more cameras?
Hendrik


copperplate photogravure

[Emil Schildt]

hehe I do have more cameras than frogs (actually mostly small toads..)....