PHOTOGRAPHIC GENRESPictorialism

Pictorialism is one of the first and likely most influential photography movements.

Beginning in the mid 1880 s and spanning′to roughly 1920 or so, Pictorialists were pivotal in establishing photography as a legitimate art medium and gaining acceptance as artists.

Photography faced an acceptance challenge at its birth. A way of capturing an image and fix it to a surface was exceptionally innovative, but is it art or mere documentation?

This was the argument many of the early practitioners faced and struggled with. The art world was very skeptical of this type of “automated” drawing.

As a result, a school of photographers came forth with the intent of giving photography validity as a serious form of art.

Pictorialism isn’t bound by style or subject. However pictorialists dealt with two primary methods for distinguishing their images from mere documentation.

First the subjects and compositions were designed to bring a sense of fantasy or visual cohesion separating themselves from the documentation of every day life.

Even landscape images tend to favor a sense of drama and effect to make the pictures more dynamic.

Photographers such as Alice Boughton and Anne Brigman combined the human figure against landscape to a high degree of innovation.

These images are still cutting edge by today’s standards.

Secondly, photographers were beginning to manipulate the chemical process itself much in the way that a painter would control their materials.

Gum bichromate was very popular at the time and photographers started applying brush strokes and other manipulations of the process to achieve a painter-like quality to the photographs.

Photographers such as Robert Demachy took this to an extreme – the work takes on a sketchily charcoal or graphite quality.

Soft focus and dramatic lighting are also used to create a painterly quality to the work as well.

This idea was likely influenced by styles such as impressionism which was contemporary at the time.

More famous later pictorialists are Alfred Stieglitz,who developed into a modernist style,

and Edward Steichen, who produced one of the first coloured prints.

The dreamy, painterly appearance of bromoil prints was very popular with the Pictoralist movement.

To reproduce a bromoil process digitally, one can apply in camera techniques such as adjusting the focus or intentionally blurring a scene or subject to produce a softer image and create movement.

A wide-angle lens can be used to distort the image and create uneven lines to replicate an impressionistic style artwork.

Increasing the ISO can also help create noise in the image to replicate the grainy characteristics of bromoil images.

Warming filters can be used to create a warm tone over the overall image. Even coloured filters can be used to create a colour cast over an image.

Photoshop allows for the manipulation of tonal ranges. Photoshop also allows for other effects such as, dodging & burning, B&W, Sepia and other coloured tones.

It also offers brushes and built-in filters to create painterly affects.

One can also add noise, dust and scratches and blur to an image to try and replicate the style of bromoil images.