“Some believed that art photography should take its lead from contemporary scientific findings. Others rejected science as hazardous to the timeless values of art and to the need for self-expression through art forms. Many felt that mass-media photography was not only vulgar and sensational, but also a symbol of the cheapening of modern life. Just as the fine arts had inspired some Victorians to devise High Art photography, turn-of-the-century photographers contrived Pictorialism—that is, a kind of photography that rejected industrialization for evocative, often hand-painted photographic images.”
Today, photography is used in science all the time—and some of the “science-y” photos are actually quite artistic, blurring the line between art and science. Film photography itself is half-art, half-science—specifically, chemistry.
“Initiated in 1912 and ending during the Great Depression, Kahn’s archive amassed film and photographs from fifty countries. The Archives de la Planète (Archives of the Planet) contains four thousand black-and-white photographs, approximately 100 hours of film, and 72,000 autochromes, the largest of its kind in the world. Kahn believed that when his collection was viewed by people it would motivate them to embrace human differences and, thereby, contribute to world peace.”
Kind of sounds like The Family of Man (Edward Steichen).
I think that that’s an awesome idea—and it would be really cool to do a show around at least some of the photos/footage.
“Increasingly press photographs emulated the casual look of the snapshot, and the few artists remaining at newspapers made their drawings look more sketchy, as if done quickly on the spot.”
I both like and dislike the idea. Yes, documentary photos are done quickly, and you don’t have a lot of time to compose a good shot if you’re, say, covering the protests/war in Libya. But I associate the word “snapshot” with photos taken by people who might not really know what they’re doing: they just leave everything on AUTO and just shoot, sometimes with a complete disregard for things like composition.
But as for sketch-like drawings, I like the idea. It saves time, too, if all you do is a quick gesture drawing. One minute—done.
“In contrast to their simple subjects, they [the Pictorialists] strove for tonal complexity, choosing techniques such as platinum printing, which yielded abundant soft, middle-gray tones. They favored procedures that allowed for handworking of both negatives and prints. Their results were in obvious visual opposition to the sharp black-and-white contrasts of the commercial print. Pictorialist photographs were frequently printed on textured paper, unlike the glossy surface of commercial photographs, so that they resembled watercolors, evoking the earlier Victorian photographs of David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron, which they admired and exhibited.”
If we were somehow able to go back in time and bring a Pictorialist back with us, I think they’d have a blast in the NBCCD photo studio, because what a lot of us are into right now is similar to what the Pictorialists were doing back in the 1800s, except that some of what we’re doing involves digital cameras, which might take a bit of explaining (no film! What’s this chip thingy-dingy? I can see the photo right away! What’s this? What’s that? How do I develop the photos?).
“Portraiture was thought to be done better by women, who were considered to possess a more intuitive grasp of the sitter’s personality and a wider range of emotional response than men.”
I see this as both a positive thing and a negative thing: on the one hand, it makes sense, but on the other hand, for some reason I seem to be reading something sexist into the idea. I guess it’s because of how we’re brought up in the West: girls are encouraged to be more sensitive, whereas men are told to suck it up and “take it like a man.”
