Define your understanding of "Pictorial Photography"

[Darryl Baird]

I think it would be helpful to further define Pictorial(ism) by comparing the optics manufactured during the span of years were discussing and the processes the Pictorialist used -- gum, platinum, carbon, etc. would be helpful to track through time as well. Above all the processes, I think gum lent itself to an expressive surface and image. Who was the first to popularize the use of such a painterly emulsion?

I've learned a huge amount about older optics here and I haven't really gotten academic about the research of the lenses, but I know some of those here have Kingslake and other sources of information about lenses. I suspect there are histories of the processes, perhaps not contained in a single source.

Inquiring minds want to know

[Darryl Baird]

... If Dallmeyer patented the first deliberately-soft-focus lens in 1866, why do we see no soft-focus photography until the 1890's? (Or have I missed them? Can anyone think of a photographer making soft-focus images in the 1860's? 1870's? 1880's?)

Mark, I think this reflects the dominance of certain popular authors, historians, and other leaders in their fields -- Emerson and Stieglitz come to mind, as well as Ansel Adams (versus William Mortenson who is just now getting more attention, post AA's influnce). History is still being written, possibly even here as well discuss this topic. It would make a great Ph.D. dissertation though.

[paulr]

Pictorialism is often linked to impressionism, but I think the comparison falls flat. Impressionism was concerned with issues of perception and depiction, and used its techniques to explore those ideas.

Pictorialism concerned itself primarily with two different ideas: the construction of a picture (which is where the word comes from, and which specifically distinguishes it from photography that's about recording something that's already there); and secondly, expression through symbolism. Pictorialist pictures weren't just blurry ... they used soft focus as a clue that what you're looking at isn't to be taken literally, but rather as a set of symbols for something else.

In these regards pictorialism is much closer kin to Romantic painting, although its subject matter was usually quieter and less grandiose. The Pictorialists liked the kinds of pastoral subjects that also attracted the Barbizon painters. So I think you could make a case that the pictorialists fell between these two contemporary painting traditions.

Mark, do I sense that you're blaspheming Julia Margaret Cameron? I'll pretend I didn't read any of that ...

[Daniel Grenier]

Pictorialism: A style of photography Adams, Weston, Strand just had to get the hell away from.

[Per Madsen]

Pictorialism is photography trying to imitate art, instead of using the
metods exclusive to photography to create art not imitating anything else.

Examples of art exclusive to photography :

August Sander
Atget
Ansel Adams
Henri Cartier Bresson

[paulr]

It's interesting that so many definitions being offered here are paraphrases of the ones used by pictorialism's mortal enemies nearly a century ago. Back then there was a war going on for the identity of photography, and the pictorialists and the f64 guys really thought one side one win.

Luckily, no side did, at least in the long term. Photography grew to be a many-headed beast, with very few people liking or even grasping all of it. Personally, I think it's more interesting this way ... as much as I love Weston's and Strand's work, I'm glad that we can go look at other kinds also.

It's worth noticing that many of the elements of pictorialism have been more in style in the last couple of decades than modernism (or than pictures following the f64 group's dogma). There's been a return to romanticism and fuzziness among both the toy camera crowd and many of the people who have gone back to alt processes. And there's been a major resurgence of constructed images. Not just the simple staged pictures that grew out of Cindy Sherman's work in the '70s, but the elaborate tableaux of people like Witkin and Crewdson and Wall.

None of these people are "pictorialists" in the pure sense, but they've returned to many of the fundamentals that the straight photography guys ridiculed back during those culture wars. Luckily the wars are over, and you're free to use the soft lens or not; to make up stories in the studio or go hunt for rocks and trees. This idea that one way or the other is more "true" to photography has outlived its usefulness, if anyone even believes at all anymore.

[Mark Sampson]

paulr, that's an excellent way of putting it- thanks. I was just thinking that fashions come, go, and eventually return slightly different. Every generation has to rebel aginst whatever came before, no?

[jnantz]

Pictorialism is photography trying to imitate art, instead of using the
metods exclusive to photography to create art not imitating anything else.

Examples of art exclusive to photography :

August Sander
Atget
Ansel Adams
Henri Cartier Bresson

what do you mean art exclusive to photography?
there are ways to use a camera and film that is exclusive to
photography that yields an image that is pictorial in nature ..
painterly, dreamlike, with subltle references to other mediums.

are you suggesting that if a photograph is not "documentary in nature"
( aren't all photographs a document of something )
they are "pictorialist" ?

[Struan Gray]

The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica entry ageorge referred to is worth reading in full:

http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Photography

(it's a sub-article tacked on the end of the very long main piece on photography. Search for 'pictorial photography' once the page has loaded).

It is interesting to see the defensive tone adopted by the pictorialists (the entry was written by Alfred Horsely Hinton) against the all-in-focus 'scientific' crowd. The defense is not against the modernists, who had not yet got going, but against previous generations of photographers who had understandably been working hard to get everything in focus.

Darryl: I'd be interested to hear your views on the links (formal, conceptual, accidental) between the pictorialists and the picturesque movement a century or so earlier. For me, the pictorialists are - as Paul said - more explictly about a the sense of construction and a love of symbolism, but the boundaries are necessarily vague. The picturesque appeals to me as a way of accepting what we're given, and not trying to make the world fit pre-defined models of perfection.

Aside No. 1: You can read large chunks of Kingslake's "The History of the Photographic Lens" at google books.

Aside No. 2: it's pre-picturesque, but I just discovered the word 'sharawadgi': an appreciation of the beauty of studied irregularity. I assume this is what Gilpin would call texture.

Anyway, for me, and contrary to Emerson, a pictorial lens doesn't priviledge the centre. All those swirl-merchants are not really following in the footsteps of the pictorialists. If anything, they are a hybrid of the modernist-pictorialist divide: making allusive images that nevertheless explicitly recognise and use the characteristics of their medium.

I have a whopping great Belgian triplet which is effectively a Cooke in a beret. As you dial in the diffusion the effect on the ground glass is much more interesting than what turns up in the final print. It must be something to do with how my eyes can sense the optical depth of the projected image. I've seen something similar in smaller formats: I took a whole bunch of out-of-focus versions of this image which had the most fantastic texture in the viewfinder, but which did not make it into the print. The closest I've seen is Jim's Aviar pic on this page. My own sharawadgistic, pictorialist quest is to find a way of capturing that texture for myself.


Struan

PS: I *love* Coburn above all the other pictorialists combined.

PPS: Beyond Words has the J. Craig Annan book on sale.

[Mark Sawyer]

Pictorialism: A style of photography Adams, Weston, Strand just had to get the hell away from.

...or maybe we should think of it as the style that drew Weston and Adams to aesthetic photography in the first place? I wonder, if there were no pictorialist style to rebel against, would the f/64 style have evolved in the way it did?