Pictorialism

Quinn: Hello and welcome back to Pictorial on Relay FM. I'm Quinn Rose, and I am someone who did not go to art school, but I have been making an art history podcast for a full year. 

Betty: Hi, and I'm Betty. I'm also someone who did not go to art school. And I have also been making an art history podcast for a full year. So we're basically experts now. So, you know, there's no need for any additional credentials.

Quinn: That's it. We passed the threshold. We are officially experts. We're, we're not, we're not experts. But this episode is going up on December 1st, which is just two days before the one year anniversary of our very first episode on December 3rd, 2019. So thanks so much for listening, whether this is your 27th episode or your very first episode. Thanks for being here.

Betty: A lot has happened in the last year since we started this podcast, I will have to say, but it's been the most amazing thing in my life so far.

Quinn: It's been so much fun to do. And thank you so much, Betty, for doing this podcast with me.

Betty: Oh, thank you Quinn for asking me to do this podcast with you. It would have never happened if you never emailed me.

Quinn: Well in celebration of our one year, we thought that we would talk about the thing that we're named after. So we're called Pictorial, which, we will be totally honest with you—We picked more because we like the word than like a particular affinity for the pictorialism movement. But it also is a cool thing in art history. So today we're going to talk about it.

Betty: To be quite honest, I actually didn't even really know what pictorialism was until I think you brought it up one day, said, hey, at some point we should talk about the pictorial movement. And I was like, I'm going to google that because I don't know what that is. And so, yeah. Now I know a little bit about it, but I, when we picked this name, I just thought it was a cool word.

Quinn: Well, it is also that, but like you know, this word, we co-opted it for our podcast and photographers co-opted it for a photography movement. And I actually, I knew a little bit about this, but the first time I ever read anything substantial about pictorialism is when I was reading this book about Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, which we talked about in our episode about that couple. But when it got to like the first time they said pictorialism, I was like that meme of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the television. I was like, yeah, I know that. 

Betty: Oh my god. Yes. I'm definitely going to put that picture in the video version so we can just see us going *gasp*.

Quinn: Oh, perfect. Yes, my true essence. Pictorialism, as we've mentioned, is a photography movement that was the biggest from about the 1880s to like the 1920s, 1930s time period. And to put it at its most simple before we dive into the details, pictorialism is the idea of photography as an art form beyond purely capturing the real world and this push towards deliberately altering how you're taking photos, whether like as you're taking the photo or especially in the development of those photos in order to create a very… in order to create something with a very heavy artistic hand in that image rather than what photography was starting, just was—just starting to become in this era, which was “anyone can take a picture." And of course artists were like, no, but I'm special. So they made this movement. 

Betty: That's exactly how every movement starts. So yeah, the word pictorialism, or the term to describe this particular movement, it’s actually derived from this book called “Pictorial Effects in Photography,” written in 1869 by a British photographer and writer, I guess, Henry Peach Robinson. That's a very cool middle name.

Quinn: I do like that. 

Betty: Yeah. So he, he had a bunch of ideas in this book, essentially, you know, about how to like compose photography and how to make it artsy basically. And one of the methods that he suggested is to make composites. So to like stitch together different pictures, like you know, physically in the dark room and making manipulations to basically… like, make a picture, that wouldn't just be like snap in with a, with a camera. Although at the time it wasn't snap, it was click, wait an hour, finish. But you know, even then some of the pictures that Robinson created and subsequent pictorialists created were compositions that were manipulated after it—when the photograph was taken. That's kind of how, yeah, it’s kind of how the term got started.

Quinn: Yeah. It's basically like how today, when you could just kind of cut and paste things in Photoshop, that, but all by hand.

Betty: Yeah. Photoshop was actually a physical thing that people did in, in this, in a studio with no lights. And sort of another person that was credited with partially starting pictorialism was another photographer called Peter Henry Emerson. And so him and his followers, they were actually inspired by painters like JMW Turner and other painters of the Barbizon school, impressionist painters. And these movements in painting that was very like romantic and full of light and shadow as well as impressionists who were known for, again, playing with light and just creating these very emotional images. And so impressionists also at the time were not deemed like they, they weren't deemed as real art either. So they were kind of in the same boat, photography and impressionism. And so, yeah, so Emerson, they wanted to recreate these painting-like aspects that the impressionists and painters like Turner were doing. So again there, in addition to arguing that, you know, photography is art, they were literally inspired by actual art.

Quinn: What's interesting about Emerson's perspective as well is that he specifically was critical of the composite painting that Robinson was such a fan of and was pioneering. But pictorialism as a wider movement, as photographers started to follow those ideas, kind of combined both of those to be like, oh, these are all ways to manipulate photography to make it closer to more traditional art styles in certain ways, but also to take advantage of certain things that photography can allow from artistic perspective, they can combine all of those.

Betty: Yeah, it is—I do find the discussion between Emerson and Robinson interesting, like about that whole like weather manipulation and cutting and pasting and Photoshopping basically is considered, like, you know, kosher or not. But, and I think, you know, and obviously that conversation continues to be had over the centuries, but I just think it's interesting that there are people who are like, oh, I don't agree with Photoshopping, but then, you know, what about the manipulations that you do like setting up a photograph, like the lights and the, way you, people sit and the way you point your camera. So it's all like, to me, it's all manipulations. It's just some are done before you click the shutter and some are done after.

Quinn: First of all, we are going to say the word pictorialism so many times that the name of our podcast is going to cease to be real. But anyway, in this movement specifically, while they did a lot to sort of do that staging and costumes and arrangements of things before you took the shot, they were most invested in the development of the photos and how they were processing them after they had already captured the film. And that's how they got lots of, most of their art effects. And so there were a few different kinds of common processes in this. One of them I just want to mention is one of the very common ones that was used, which is called gum bichromate. And so they used a couple of different chemicals, gum arabic, potassium bichromate, and then, a color. And then basically this solution will harden as light hits it, but this area is able to be manipulated for several hours. So that means that the photographer does have a lot of time to sort of choose the exposure to expose this mixture to different areas of the photo, or even to change like what the proportions are in the mixture itself to create different looks. And this can give you a lot of different effects in your photography. And so in the end, you can use this to manipulate color either by adding color to your images, which was not a thing at the time, or just by influencing like the amount of light and dark in it, and the overall exposure that your photograph has. And so you can create really, not just artistic effects, but effects that were clearly like, the technology of cameras at the time was not capable of. And so you were clearly showing sort of like your artistic hand in it.

Betty: Yeah, I did find one picture and there might be more examples, but the one I found is a photo called The Flat Iron by Edward Steichen. That was taken in 1904 and printed in 1909. And it’s a picture taken at night of the Flat Iron building in New York and there's some like shadowy figures walking in front of it and some shadowy trees in the foreground. And so, yeah, this obviously at the time would have just been taken in black and white because that's the only thing the cameras were able to do at the time. And then he would have used this gum arabic method to manipulate and now obviously he did add some of this like green bluish color tint to it. And he probably also made the like glowing looking atmosphere. So I'm not sure how much of it was like there initially and how much he added, but this like soft tonality was very much like a key idea of pictorialism. So this is an example of sort of that, you know, that soft tone, like it makes it look like there's fog and mist all over the place, which there may have been when he took the photograph, but it looks like there's more.

Quinn: All I will say about this to sort of paint a mental picture for everyone is extremely spooky vibes. This is like big spooky vibes.

Betty: It's yeah, it’s like, I mean, those shadowy figures look like they're coming towards you and they're going to like haunt you or, or something.

Quinn: I feel like I'm going to see Sherlock Holmes come around the corner.

Betty: Most likely. And the other thing about this picture by Steichen is again, you can see that he’s, or he overtly I think did talk about his influences. So he would have been very much influenced by these Nocturne paintings by the American painter, James Abbott McNeill Whistler. And so it again, it's, it looks very much like this photograph except that’s, those are paintings. And then the other thing that he probably was influenced by was Japanese woodcuts. So in like the early 1900s, Japanese woodcuts were like super trendy and everybody bought them and, or tried to imitate them. And like even artists like Van Gogh, you know, was influenced by Japanese woodcuts. So were these photographers. So again, it's just more like arguments, I guess, in terms of, artists, in terms of photographers arguing that, you know, this is a fine art cause or inspired by fine art. As we mentioned in the Georgia O'Keeffe podcast, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz was literally married to a fine artist and he was a photographer. And again, he was one of the pioneering photographers that was really trying to push photography as a real artistic medium. And he can be like, hey, I know art. I'm married to an artist.

Quinn: Okay. A couple of things with that. One, Stieglitz’s position as a photographer, there was actually a lot of controversy back and forth with him. He was a hugely influential photographer. He probably is the most famous American photographer of the 20th century. But he also, like, wasn't very good at getting along with people, it seems. He specifically founded a group called the Photo Secession Group because the group that, like the flagship photography society didn't want him to be there anymore. Because like pictorialism was kind of controversial, not totally controversial because they did have a lot of artists and it was a big thing, but there were a lot of people who didn't believe that pictorialism was the right direction for photography. And Stieglitz was kind of the main person leading pictorialism as a movement, as well as like a couple other people, but he was like the main guy. He founded this photo secession group, which was totally dedicated to pictorial photography. He created an entire quarterly magazine called Camera Work. It was like he, you know, when like group projects where one person does all the work, that's like Stieglitz for the pictorialism movement. And I think it's partially because he was so passionate about it and partially because it does seem like he did have control issues, but he totally like financed and edited this quarterly magazine. And he ran the gallery, which was called 291, that was dedicated to photography, specifically pictorialism. And on the Georgia O'Keeffe thing, that's, it is very cute, the like I'm married to an artist thing, but he didn't get married to her until like, after this movement had peaked.

Betty: Good point. But you know, true. But later he could argue that.

Quinn: The thing about being so integral to have movement and to kind of like be leading all of it is that if you stop doing it, then it kind of fades away without you, which is basically what happened to pictorialism. It never totally went away, but Stieglitz himself got more interested in modernist photography, which is less dedicated to all of these sort of artsy methods and really messing with how you developed the film and all this stuff. And more towards like sharp lines and taking photos of real things and real people and sort of like city life, and stuff that wasn't traditionally taken as artistic, and sort of the fine arts kind of way. And so that's where the movement, and so that's where photography in the United States, at least specifically, but also sort of worldwide was heading and like Stieglitz himself, like headed in that direction and then everyone else was like, okay. Again, it never totally went away as an art style, but it definitely like that was the end of it as like a really intensive movement specifically in the United States and specifically in New York City, even, it really just sort of passed into modernism.

Betty: So it's like when the person who does the group projects just takes off and everybody else is like, wow, there's no one to do the work. So I guess we’re going to fail.

Quinn: There were like, oh, I guess we're kind of done now? Cause it was funny, cause when I was reading about this, it said like, oh, it was, it was popular. It was most popular until like the 1920s. And I'm like, oh, well, what happened? And it was like, kind of just Alfred Stieglitz stopped doing it.

Betty: Yeah, he left.

Quinn: Yeah there were some other, other things going on, but like, and they had some steam past him being in the forefront of it, but like not much.

Betty: Yeah. Well, one thing about camera work and about Stieglitz’s publication is actually when I was looking into it and some of the photographers and people he exhibited in it. I did come across some, a photographer that I did know, even though I didn't know what pictorialism was, is this artist called Adolf DeMeyer. And he was, so he was a photographer. He was most known for taking pictures of famous people. And so to be quite honest, reading the list of famous people he took pictures of, I don't know who most of these people are except like, King George. But one photo that I do know about is this picture he took of Marchesa Louis Louisa Casady. And so she's really well-known to me because her, a painting of hers is a frequent painting on my tour at the AGO. We have this really famous painting of Casady done by the artist Augustus John at the AGO. And she's somebody who basically shows up in like almost like every portrait around this time period, anybody who did portraits, she showed up and they painted her and she slept with most of them. So that's a side note, but anyway, so yeah, but I think it's interesting just to kind of look at these examples of what was considered pictorialism. Sort of like this Casati portrait is that, again, like it shows you that like contrast and tonality and their, like this kind of reminds me a little bit of like these Renaissance chiaroscuro, like light and dark paintings. And again, they're trying to make photographs look like it was like hand drawn or something. But in any case, like his work is like, it's probably one of the earliest known like fashion photography, you know, like actually considered to be photography and like artistic, but like fashion. You know, which in later years would lead into like Vogue and now fashion photography is a huge thing. But in any case, it just, you know, it kind of got its early start with this guy.

Quinn: That's pretty cool. I feel like all of this, all of these like photography movements and little off shoots are so interconnected. And also because like, even though there is obviously so much you can do with photography, you still are at the end of the day taking an image of the real world. And so it just is more recognizable back to a single point than something like painting, which spans from like portraits to Jackson Pollock, where I feel like it's easier to see all of the connections and all of the through lines with photography. Also it's been around for a lot less time. And so it is easier in that way too.

Betty: Yes, that's true. Yeah, you can, you can point to when photography was sort of invented back in like 1830s, but can't really point to when painting was invented because…

Quinn: That’s—isn't that like the earliest we have of anything?

Betty: It's the first evidence we have of humanity. So, you know, it's been around for quite a while. So this is a, a photograph that was produced by the author that we talked about before that pictorialism came from, Henry Peach Robinson. So it's a composition with, apparently it's composed of five different negatives. So he took five different pictures and stitched it together. So it's like a scene of a very sick woman, and she’s the one who's lying down. She's probably dying. She's surrounded by three of her family. So her mom, and then I think it's like her sister apparently, and there's somebody else, maybe her—or her dad is by the window. And his shape is like outlined against the light pouring in from the windows. And so, again, he’s the person who, you know, was really into cutting and pasting, Photoshopping. And so, but apparently this photograph is, or this type of imagery was very common in the 19th century. Apparently the British were super obsessed with death. So maybe because people were dying all the time cause of illness probably. And they also were like, infatuated with like the paintings of sick or dying children. They were very morbid and weird. So anyways, he created a very typical like Victorian image apparently. It's just instead of painting it, he made it out of five different photographs that he took. And yeah, so like this, this again, so this is like one of the examples of the composite image and you can tell that it's, you know, not a single photo that was taken. And in fact, like it looks really surreal. And I think the point isn't to look like it's a real scene of a bunch of people sitting around, the point is to make it look like it's like dream-like or surreal or some like magical mythological situation.

Quinn: This being made out of five different photographs feels like the very early version of like what deep fakes are today because it's, it's supposed to look real like it's ooh, it's, this is a scene that is not real and didn't actually specifically happen this way, but like we're pushing the limits of the technology that we have to make it look like it did. And on the other hand, it does look like the cover of a spooky novel. All pictorialism is very spooky. And it does look like a, sort of a Gothic horror novel. But this is, I do like this picture though. It looks cool.

Betty: Yeah. So since of course Robinson was using all these cool, like fancy new techniques and Steichen was, they were using the bi-carbonate stuff that I can't pronounce to manipulate the photographs. And so I think these discussions about technology's role in art and also, you know, the question of whether photography really is art or not isn't something that has gone away in the past 200 years. So, even though Stieglitz, you know, went away, the conversation about photography and its place in the art world definitely hasn’t. And of course, today it's even more of like a conversation that we're having, you know, of course with everybody has a, or just about everybody has a smartphone that they can take photographs, you can upload it to Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok or other things that I don't use. [laughs] So, and I was even talking to my dad cause we grew up in China and there you, the retirement age is like much earlier. My parents would actually be retiring now if they still lived there. And so I asked my dad, I was like, oh, what do you think you'd be doing if you're retired? And he was saying, he's probably going to do, like, he would be like photography and stuff, but he's like, oh, but you know today, it's not like before, before when you retire and it's, you know, if you were interested in photography and it's a hobby, you would buy a camera and go take photos. Now literally if you're a person you're a photographer, apparently, and this is—my dad actually has a hobby of photography. He picked up like a camera back before digital cameras existed and he actually did do work in the dark room and like photography is one of his longest hobbies. But he's now “pfft” at all of these like new people, like, you know, he's like, my uncle who doesn't even know basically like how to take a picture, he's like an Instagram or like, you know, whatever. And he's so like, oh, so I dunno, he's like the photography hipster, he's like, I liked it before it was popular.

Quinn: Oh my god, there are so many photography hipsters these days. And I love that our dad is one of them.

Betty: My dad is definitely one of them. Yeah. 

Quinn: That brings me to a little discussion topic that I wanted to end today with, which is sort of the contemporary idea of pictorialism. Because as soon as I started reading about how like most of pictorialism is like compositing images or altering them in development. And one thing that we didn't really mention in the history of this is this was in reaction to just photography in general, but also specifically the Kodak camera coming out and photography getting much easier for people, much as smartphones made them easier and annoyed your dad. But then they were like, oh, it's no longer super difficult to take pictures. So now we need something else to be, to prove sort of artistic merit to it and to prove skill related to it. But all of this really made me think about Instagram and smartphones. And if you take a picture and then you edit it on Instagram, is that pictorialism? What do you think? 

Betty: Yeah… yes? Actually I haven't thought about it very much to be quite honest. Well, so I think this is one of the reasons like, even when I was looking up pictorialism and its history, like the original pictorialism from the 19th century, so many sources said, you know, this is a very hard term to define. It's not really, there's not really any agreed upon definition of it. It's not like impressionism in a way where it's like a very specific movement, even though this, there were people who pioneered it. So, you know, so of course, yeah, like Instagram, by the general big overarching definition of pictorialism probably would count. But yeah, like it, it is interesting. Cause like Instagram, it’s all about, you know, you're not just taking a picture. You're like cropping it and putting these filters on it and you’re manipulating it in a way to make it appear intentional, I guess, not just something that you, you snapped, and again like that, that really is just like an easier way to Photoshop. Like it is so funny how like originally it's just, it's so hard to take a photo and then Kodak came out and it's more accessible. And then, but if you want to manipulate a negative, you still have to, you still have to go into a dark room and then like Photoshop came out and then my dad's like, I used to do that by hand. And then I'm like, okay, well, whatever. And then Instagram came out and then those of us who grew up using Photoshop were like oh my God, I used to have to do that on a computer and open up a program and click crop and like the lasso tool or whatever. And now they don't even have to do that. So I don't know, maybe in 10 years, like kids can just blink and they can pull it just on Instagram.

Quinn: Well, I guess it depends on if you're defining pictorialism by like, manipulation of images for an artistic intent or use doing a process that is more difficult than the entry-level hold, which is like, is that what it is according to the official definitions that we talk about? No, but that kind of is what it is in response to. And so that sort of reactive definition would mean that like, oh, well just editing in Instagram wouldn't count, but like doing it in Photoshop and doing a full redo in Photoshop, which is beyond like sort of the entry level app, then that would count as pictorialism. I'm not saying I agree with that, but I do think that like, if I was to set up this sort of scenario to Alfred Stieglitz, once I had explained a lot of things to him, I almost think that like he would, well, okay. I think that he would probably not think it was pictorialism unless you're developing it by hand. But if we could get him on board with like digital editing, I feel like he definitely would be like Instagram doesn't count, which I find like a very funny, like, I think that the goalposts move as you go.

Betty: Oh, for sure. And again, even to just a further talk about my dad the really old hipster, when I went out for a hike with my parents this past weekend, and my dad brought his, you know, like his DSLR, his Nikon whatever, with the really good lens and everything. But obviously we all brought our, like our phones with us. And I would say my dad used his super fancy camera twice and 99% of the pictures were taking between my phone, my mom's phone, my dad's phone. So I think this conversation it's similar to like when people talk about fine art and some people think it's only are, if it's really skilled, like it's got to be super detailed, super naturalistic, realistic, like, you know, no abstraction. And it's gotta be like this really professional thing. And, while you know, others don't think that has to be the case. Like it doesn't necessarily have to be difficult for it to be an interesting work of art. It doesn't have to be like realism for it to be good. And so I think similar to this photography discussion, like you don't have to use a fancy $8,000 camera to make an interesting photograph. And again, people, there are people on Instagram who have like zero technical photography ability who may not even know how to properly edit, but they can take something that's interesting and it could be considered art. But some people of course will still say it's not.

Quinn: Well, what I think we've come to is what we often come to in these kinds of conversations is that the two of us have a very wide definition of art. And we think that you shouldn't gate-keep about these things. 

Betty: And I just, before we end, I do just, I forgot to mention this earlier, but there is a pretty nice quote from Henry Peach Robinson in sort of talking about pictorialism. So he said, “as music has only sound under governance of certain laws, so is pictorial effect. Only the combination of certain forms and lights and shadows in like manner harmoniously brought to you.”

Quinn: Wow. Well, there you go. Thank you so much everybody for listening to this episode of Pictorial and all of the past year's episodes of Pictorial. If you want to see more of us, you can find our show notes at relay.fm/pictorial, and also follow us on Twitter or Instagram @Pictorial Pod. And if you want to, you can follow me on Twitter or Instagram @aspiringrobotfm.

Betty: And you can also follow me on Twitter or Instagram @articulationsV. I’m also on YouTube as ARTiculations. And speaking of YouTube, we also upload these podcast episodes to YouTube under Pictorial Podcasts, where you can look at all of these spooky images as we edit them into the video for you.

Quinn: Thanks for listening, art enthusiasts!