Critique of the body of work of the Pictorialists

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Borja S. Fernández

London, 2009                                                                                                              

CRITIQUE OF THE BODY OF WORK OF THE PICTORIALISTS

The critique of a body of work in Art is always challenged by the idea (modern but nonetheless solid) that within the artistic creation everything is legitimate and all particular movement and styles have an inherent validity). Photography, in its birth and its hard ascension to the category of Art, however, split itself into two very different spheres: the sphere of Science on one hand, the sphere of Art on the other. Although photography had been around for some 40 years, and although discussion had already arisen regarding the scientific validity of the photograph against its manipulation, as it was the case with the works of Oscar Reijlander and most particularly with his “Two ways of life”, the matter of considering the photographic medium as Art did not really start off until the coming of the so called Pictorialism.

   Because of this, the challenge here is double, for it forces us to critically approach their works from two contradictory perspectives. First, we have to make a critique considering Photography as a scientific instrument, bearing in mind the current of thought of the time, wondering whether or not the use the Pictorialists made of it was valid or not, and if so, in which ways and under what reasoning. Secondly, we have to approach their work as a work of Art, taking then into account their artistic and historical precedents, influences, methods and so on.

Historically speaking, as Brent R. Benjamin notes in the foreword of the Impressionist Camera (2006:7) Pictorialism was born in Britain, in the last two decades of the 19th century, and proved to be “one of the first truly international movements in art” as it expanded both in space and time for more than thirty years throughout the rest of Europe, America and even Asia; America being the country which took the lead after the initial British burst, and culminating with the Photo Secession group and the famous 's publication “Camera Work”.

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Examining the Pictorialists’ work in a sociological context we can easily understand why their methods were thought to be not only worthless but sacrilegious with the new medium of Photography. From its very beginning, the first and utmost characteristic of photography relied on its capability to capture reality from a supposedly objective angle, leaving aside the subjectiveness of a human consciousness and presenting its subjects under the light of the purely universal and unequivocal Science. From this point of view, the work of the Pictorialists was merely a copy of painting, a waste of the possibilities of what only ...

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