Overview
Photography as a technical process involving the development of film and prints in a darkroom originated in the early 19th century, with the forerunners of traditional photographic prints coming into prominence around 1838-1840. Not long after the new medium was established, photographers, painters and others began to argue about the relationship between the scientific and artistic aspects of the medium. As early as 1853, English painter William John Newton proposed that the camera could produce artistic results if the photographer would keep an image slightly out of focus. Others vehemently believed that a photograph was equivalent to the visual record of a chemistry experiment. Photography historian Naomi Rosenblum points out that "the dual character of the medium — its capacity to produce both art and document — demonstrated soon after its discovery…. Nevertheless, a good part of the nineteenth century was spent debating which of these directions was the medium's true function."
These debates reached their peak during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, culminating in the creation of a movement that is usually characterized as a particular style of photography: pictorialism. This style is defined first by a distinctly personal expression that emphasizes photography's ability to create visual beauty rather than simply record facts. However, recently historians have recognized that pictorialism is more than just a visual style. It evolved in direct context with the changing social and cultural attitudes of the time, and, as such, it should not be characterized simply as a visual trend. One writer has noted that pictorialism was "simultaneously a movement, a philosophy, an aesthetic and a style."
Contrary to what some histories of photography portray, pictorialism did not come about as the result of a linear evolution of artistic sensibilities; rather, it was formed through "an intricate, divergent, often passionately conflicting barrage of strategies." While photographers and others debated whether photography could be art, the advent of photography directly affected the roles and livelihoods of many traditional artists. Prior to the development of photography, a painted miniature portrait was the most common means of recording a person's likeness. Thousands of painters were engaged in this art form. But photography quickly negated the need for and interest in miniature portraits. One example of this effect was seen at the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy in London; in 1830 more than 300 miniature paintings were exhibited, but by 1870 only 33 were on display. Photography had taken over for one type of art form, but the question of whether photography itself could be artistic had not been resolved.
Some painters soon adopted photography as a tool to help them record a model's pose, a landscape scene or other elements to include in their art. It's known that many of the great 19th century painters, including Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Degas, Cézanne, and Gauguin, took photographs themselves, used photographs by others and incorporated images from photographs into their work. While heated debates about the relationship between photography and art continued in print and in lecture halls, the distinction between a photographic image and a painting became more and more difficult to discern. As photography continued to develop, the interactions between painting and photography became increasingly reciprocal. More than a few pictorial photographers, including Alvin Langdon Coburn, Edward Steichen, Gertrude Käsebier, Oscar Gustave Rejlander, and Sarah Choate Sears, were originally trained as painters or took up painting in addition to their photographic skills.
It was during this same period that cultures and societies around the world were being affected by a rapid increase in intercontinental travel and commerce. Books and magazines published on one continent could be exported and sold on another with increasing ease, and the development of reliable mail services facilitated individual exchanges of ideas, techniques and, most importantly for photography, actual prints. These developments led to pictorialism being "a more international movement in photography than almost any other photographic genre." Camera clubs in the U.S., England, France, Germany, Austria, Japan and other countries regularly lent works to each other's exhibitions, exchanged technical information and published essays and critical commentaries in one another's journals. Led by The Linked Ring in England, the Photo-Secession in the U.S., and the Photo-Club de Paris in France, first hundreds and then thousands of photographers passionately pursued common interests in this multi-dimensional movement. Within the span of little more than a decade, notable pictorial photographers were found in Western and Eastern Europe, North America, Asia and Australia.
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