From: Sarah Van Keuren (svk@steuber.com)
Date: 02/12/01-09:16:58 PM Z
Sandy King wrote on 2/12/01
> If we are to equate pictorialism only with its two major movements or
> schools, the first championed by Henry Peach Robinson from the 1860s to the
> end of the 19th century, the second the new Pictorialism that began with
> Peter Henry Emerson in the 1880s and spread from English to the photo clubs
> in France and Germany, and eventually to the US, then it is certainly
> correct to state that Pictorialism is dead, as is Modernism and even
> Post-Modernish (or so exhausted it should be dead).
Certainly the composite images that one can create in Photoshop bring Henry
Peach Robinson to mind.
>
> If on the other hand we were to list several of the most essential
> characteristics of pictorial photography we would find that many, if not
> all, continue to play a major role in contemporary photographic aesthetics.
> Which of the following qualities, for example, which I consider to be the
> most essential characteristics of pictorial photography, are absent from
> the contemporary aesthetic?
>
> 1. presentation of the picturesque
> 2. a concern with making art, as opposed with making a record
> 3. the concept that the work reveals the subjective of the maker through
> signs of conscious manipulation
> 4. an interest in the effect and patterns of natural lighting
> 5. landscape as one of the major themes
> 6. overall effect of an image considered more important than the detail
therein
> 7. the use of non-silver printing processes, particulary carbon, gum,
> platinum, oil and bromoil.
Don't you think that #1 is absent from the contemporary scene except on the
commercially co-opted fringes? The others are present, I think.
>
> Anyone who seriously believes that pictorialism is dead and longgone
> should reacquaint themselves with the true tenets of the movement and take
> a wider look at some of the current manipulative manifestions in
> photography, manifestions prompted in part prompted by the new digital
> technologies, but which also date back to the re-emergence of alternative
> printing processes that began in the 1970s. What if not Neo-Pictorialism
> are we to call the photograhs of Ed Freeman, featured on pp. 42-49 of the
> October/November 1999 issue of Camera Arts. How if not pictorial are we to
> label the cyanotype images featured in the article by Ken Boyd and Heathe
> Kyatt in the January/February issue of View Camera?
I missed seeing Ed Freeman's work.
>
> Sandy King
I find this an interesting thread.
Sarah Van Keuren
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