CategoriesStyles and Movements
Pictorialism
An international photographic movement of about 1885 to 1915 that used soft focus and handworked prints to claim photography as fine art.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
From the 1880s to the First World War, photographers who wanted their medium accepted as fine art made prints that looked shaped by hand. They used soft-focus lenses, textured papers and slow, controllable processes such as platinum prints with long silvery greys and gum bichromate prints brushed and scrubbed like wash drawings. Subjects leaned towards misty landscapes, twilight streets, allegory and tender studies of mothers and children, often in the muted tones of James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
Camera clubs carried the movement internationally: the Linked Ring in London from 1892, the Photo-Club de Paris, the Vienna Camera Club, and Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession in New York, founded in 1902 and championed in his journal Camera Work (1903–17). Edward Steichen's The Flatiron (1904) and Gertrude Käsebier's The Manger (1899) show its range. By 1917 Camera Work was publishing Paul Strand's sharp, unmanipulated pictures, and Stieglitz himself had turned to straight photography.
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