History of Photography

IX

Pictorialism: An Artistic Revolt

Widespread amateur photography was greeted with dismay by photographers who saw their medium as a form of art. A group who became known as pictorialists sought to distinguish their artistic efforts from the snapshots taken by masses of so-called Kodakers. Pictorialists favored specialized (and difficult) darkroom techniques that gave them more control over their results. Some altered images by hand, as for example, Gertrude Käsebier, who softened and blurred parts of photographs during the printing process. American painter Frank Eugene had an even more extreme approach, applying a needle directly to negatives and scratching pencil-like lines or shading around figures. In contrast to snapshots of the time, the compositions of the pictorialists favored simplicity, with broad areas of extreme darks and lights. Most of the pictorialists favored subject matter made popular by impressionist painters: hazy landscapes, nudes, and groups of children gamboling in nature.

There were exceptions, however. American Fred Holland Day gained notoriety for dressing himself as Jesus Christ and acting out biblical stories for his camera. Alfred Stieglitz, a leader of the pictorialist movement, used his camera to capture the urban energy of his native city, New York. His works combined modern subject matter, including ferryboats and airplanes, with the naturalistic style advocated earlier by P. H. Emerson.

In 1902 Stieglitz broke away from the pictorialist movement to found his own elite group of artistic photographers, the Photo-Secession. Several former pictorialists joined him as founding members of the new group, including Käsebier, Clarence White, and Edward Steichen. Stieglitz set up the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (better known as Gallery 291 for its address on New York City’s Fifth Avenue), which was devoted to showing photography as an artistic medium, along with modern painting and sculpture. Stieglitz’s gallery and the Photo-Secession publication Camera Work, which he edited from 1903 to 1917, helped him to become the leading voice in the establishment of a new and more modern aesthetic in photography. Paralleling developments in painting and sculpture, this new aesthetic embraced modern urban and industrial subjects, abstract composition, and a straightforward and unsentimental approach that would come to dominate the practice and criticism of photography in the 20th century.

X

20th Century: Commercial Functions

As the technology for reproducing photographs improved in the first decade of the 20th century, a new world of images began to make the world seem smaller and its manufactured goods more desirable. Along with motion pictures, which the Lumière brothers of France introduced to the world in 1895, photographs in reproduction led to new concepts of celebrity, culture, advertising, and entertainment, all of which depended on the availability of a mass audience.

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One example of the new visual culture provided by photomechanical reproduction is the birth of picture magazines, so called because their contents were defined as much by photographs as by text. Although many historians credit the illustrated weeklies published in Germany in the 1920s—such as Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung and Münchner Illustrierte Presse—as early models of the modern picture magazine, an even earlier publication was the National Geographic. Begun in 1888 as a journal for about a thousand geographers, the magazine transformed itself to capture an audience of millions by incorporating photographs into its pages. By 1907 fully half of its pages were devoted to exotic images from around the world. More importantly, the National Geographic editors wrote text to fit the photographs on hand, rather than the reverse.

A

Color Photography

In 1914 the National Geographic was also one of the first magazines to reproduce color photographs. Color photography was itself new at the time, although the idea had tantalized inventors since Talbot and Daguerre. Several processes for producing color had been proposed in the 19th century, but none proved workable outside the laboratory. The Autochrome process, created in 1904 by the Lumières, was both practical and widely marketed. It utilized a layer of dyed starch grains over a standard black-and-white emulsion; when the monochrome layer was developed after exposure, it produced a positive transparency. The clear areas of the transparency allowed light to shine through the appropriately colored bits of starch, while the shadow areas remained properly dark.

Nonetheless, color remained a sidelight in photography until the 1930s because it required considerable patience and expense on the part of both photographer and printer. The dominance of color in terms of reproduction and everyday picture-taking did not begin until 1935, when Kodak started to sell Kodachrome transparency film, and was completed by the introduction of color-print films and Ektachrome films in the 1940s.

Even without color, magazines brought a steady diet of visual excitement to their readers. Photographers for German picture weeklies of the 1920s and their 1930s imitators, such as Picture Post in England and Life in the United States, used the latest small cameras (preeminently, the German Leica) to capture events as they happened. The narrative style of early photojournalists, such as Alfred Eisenstaedt, Martin Munkacsi, and Erich Salomon in Germany, and André Kertész in Paris, made readers feel as if they were on the scene with the photographers. The immediacy of their style influenced later practitioners including Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, and W. Eugene Smith, all of whom worked with publication in mind.

B

Fashion

Fashion photography developed along with the new picture magazines. Confined at first to studio portraits of society women in their finery, it turned to professional models and professional photographers to enliven images and entice the reader. Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar magazines hired full-time staff photographers—most notably, American Edward Steichen and Englishman Cecil Beaton, both one-time pictorialists. These photographers began to use elaborate lighting schemes to achieve the same sort of glamorizing effects being perfected by Clarence Bull as he photographed new starlets in Hollywood, California. Martin Munkacsi initiated a fresh look in fashion photography after Harper’s Bazaar hired him in 1934. He moved the models outdoors, where he photographed them as active, energetic modern women.

The new approach to photography in the editorial content of magazines was matched by an increasingly sophisticated use of photography in advertisements. Steichen, while also working for Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines, became one of the highest-paid photographers of the 1930s through his work for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. Together with Anton Bruehl, Nickolas Muray, and others, he helped transform the look of advertising photography from straightforward catalog pictures of a product to more natural and sensuous depictions, often with the addition of a woman’s hands to indicate the product’s usefulness and practicality. Some advertising photographers began to rely on elaborate stage sets constructed for the camera, recalling the era of Rejlander and Robinson. The artistry of photography succeeded in manufacturing consumer desire even during the worldwide economic depression of the 1930s.

XI

20th Century: A Modern Art

The art of photography took a dramatic turn in the 20th century’s second decade, influenced both by the straightforward look of early commercial photographs and by vanguard painting and sculpture in Europe. Stieglitz began to use his New York gallery to promote a more modern style of photography, as embodied in the work of American Paul Strand. Strand’s pictures, such as The White Fence, Port Kent, New York, 1916 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) are crisply sharp but nearly abstract in their strong, spare compositions. They were among the first examples of purist, or straight, photography, so named because it relied on the qualities inherent to photography. These included sharpness, rich detail, full tonality, and unretouched printing on commercially manufactured papers.

Purism was the American contribution to a range of 20th-century artistic practices grouped under the label of modernism. Like modernism in painting and sculpture (see Modern Art), straight photography was based on the idea that every artistic medium has its own distinct properties, which artists should seek to exploit. For instance, instead of playing down photography’s connection to a machine, modernist photographers sought to emphasize it. During the 1920s Strand, Stieglitz, and American painter and photographer Charles Sheeler took crisply detailed pictures of the mechanisms of movie cameras, railroads, and automobiles. Stieglitz used the same sharp focus in portraits of his wife, painter Georgia O’Keeffe, and in a series of pictures of clouds.

In Europe, László Moholy-Nagy, a Hungarian-born artist teaching in Germany at the Bauhaus (a vanguard design school), felt that photography had the power to transform culture in fundamental ways. He declared that the camera held the key to a new age, which he called the “New Vision.” It would be a culture of light in which “everyone will be compelled to see that which is optically true.” In his own work he went beyond the camera, producing photograms (his term for pictures made in the darkroom by shining light onto objects directly) and photomontages (images made by combining parts of different photographs). Aleksandr Rodchenko and other artists involved in the Russian constructivism movement shared Moholy-Nagy’s vision of photography’s power, and they sought to develop an art appropriate to the needs of the working classes in the newly formed Soviet Union.

Photography played a significant part in dada and surrealism, art movements that encompassed literature and theater as well as painting and sculpture. Dada artists in Germany, such as John Heartfield, developed a form of nonsensical photo collage around 1920, using it to express dissatisfaction with social conventions and to satirize government institutions. In Paris, surrealists such as American expatriate Man Ray saw photography as an avenue into the subconscious or into a world beyond reality. They discovered pictures of old Paris streets by French photographer Eugène Atget, and savored the way Atget’s apparently ordinary style produced remarkable effects from shop-window reflections, for example. However, unlike Atget, Man Ray often violated convention in his uses of photography. In Violin d’Ingres (1924), for example, he added ink drawing to transform a woman’s bare back into a musical instrument. In darkroom experiments he reversed darks and lights in the contours of objects, producing an otherworldly effect known as solarization.

Thanks to published reproductions, the different styles of modernist photography spread quickly and often mingled together in exhibitions. The establishment of a photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1940 helped solidify the belief that photography was a modern art and that its modernity was universal and unified. In the United States, however, the purely artistic practice of photography was constantly being challenged by those who saw photography as a form of social documentation. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the United States government hired Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, and other photographers to document farming conditions across the country. Their images, including Lange’s famous Migrant Worker’s Family (1936), remain an example of how photography can engage viewers’ sympathy and create support for social reforms. Because their style of photography was essentially straight, however, it came to be viewed as art as well as social documentation.

French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson was similarly recognized as both artist and documentarian. He began as a painter, but started working as a photojournalist in the early 1930s. He is now recognized as an accomplished artist for his ability to capture his subjects in what he called the “decisive moment,” the precise instant when form and content conspire to create an image of potent significance and beauty.

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