Episode 10
26minutes.
Photo - Pictorialism
Synopsis
50 years after it was invented, photography once again sought to rival painting. The debate was as old as photography itself: is photography merely a simple, mechanical "imitation " of reality, or can it interpret reality subjectively, as drawing and painting can?
Turning its back on confronting reality, the Pictorialist movement endeavoured to practise a photography that was stripped of its original defect - its objective and mechanical precision - to produce the subjectivity and "soft focus " of drawing and painting.
Pictorialism shared a refusal of the modern world with its contemporary, symbolism. It preferred outdated or timeless themes, such as historical subjects, mythology, religion, landscapes and academic nudes.
Reactionary in its themes and aesthetics, Pictorialism featured great daring of form, developing processes (such as soft focus, special lenses, printing effects, and drawing, engraving or painting on prints) that today's most post-modern photographers would not shy away from.
It was an "inverted avant-garde " in which the grand masters, Robert Demachy, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Frank Eugene, Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz deployed their acute creativity in making photography not appear to be photography. The movement took the limelight for about twenty years, in Europe and the United States.
Available Versions
Audio
French, German, English, Italian
Subtitle
French
Transcription
None