From: Kate Mahoney (kateb@paradise.net.nz)
Date: 10/14/03-03:37:25 AM Z
Re: {OT} Neo-Pictorialism and sentimentalityI actually meant sickly, I just typo'd - sugary and overly sentimental is as close as I can get - the sort of feeling you would get if you ate a whole box of chocolates at one sitting.
cheers
Kate
----- Original Message -----
From: Sandy King
To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
Sent: Tuesday, October 14, 2003 3:46 AM
Subject: Re: {OT} Neo-Pictorialism and sentimentality
Shannon wrote:
Kate wrote:
I only hope our latest bunch of "neo-pictorialists" will refrain from the
sicky!!!
This is one of the issues that I"m struggling with, in writing about Pictorialism. Why was so much of it so...sentimental, for lack of a better word? (I think my teachers are already worried that I like "romantic" and "sentimental" images because I photograph my rural neighborhood a lot, and to them anything rural, no matter how gritty, is de facto romantic and even politically retro.) A lot of Julia Margaret Cameron's work is brilliant, but some of it is really what Kate would call "sicky," I think. And not just because it involves naked children; the real problem is that the naked children are supposed to personify Spring, or Truth, or some abstraction like that.
I haven't noticed that The Antiquarian Avant-Garde over-indulges much in the kind of Victorian kitsch that we associate with 19th century pictorialism, but maybe I have just been associating with extraordinarily sophisticated practitioners, such as yourselves. Does late 20th/early 21st century Pictorialism have its own version of kitsch? Let's pick on pinhole and Holga users for example: seen any really kitschy Holga or pinhole pictures? (It's ok if they are cyanotypes too!) And what is kitsch?
I was forced this past summer to read that awful Art in Theory 1900-2000 book and the topic came up a lot in that book, but I want to know what YOU think it is.
Shannon,
I am not sure exactly what Kate meant by the term "sicky." Perhaps she might want to elaborate on it.
You appear to have associated the word with "sentimental," but please correct me if that is not correct.
However, to directly address your question, much pictorial work of the period was sentimental because the artists meant for it to convey not only visual information but also to tell a story, or a narrative that shows moral truths. In other words, the object in reality, or the referent, is important primarily for what it tells us about another reality (allegorical, biblical, mythological, and surrealistic).
This way of making photographs was entirely consistent with the art traditions of the time, and with virtually all preceding art movements, because virtually all western painting from the middle ages through the 19th century had an important narrative component. In fact, the visual element was primarily important for the way it was used to convey other meanings.
We don't look at photographs that way today, and any hint that the photography is being used to provide a narrative that would lead us to moral values is seen as sentimental and trite. But those who condemn this type of photography do so at the risk of their own words and works becoming irrelevant because in the end artistic tastes and movements reflect more local and historical circumstances than any universal mandate on creativity, meaning, truth or beauty.
I am reminded of a recent exchange in which it was held that there is nothing truthful in photography, and that Art is about Art, not truth, and certainly not beauty. But it has not always been and if you don't believe me just look at how closely intertwined were the concept of physical beauty with those of moral beauty and eternal truth in the Neoplatonic tradition of the 15th and 16th centuries.
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