When photography began its triumphal advance in the nineteenth century, many people regarded it primarily as one thing: a technical invention. It could record reality with astonishing precision, produce portraits at a speed previously unimaginable, and document events. Yet this very ability was also used against it. Critics did not consider photography an art form, but merely a mechanical process. A painter, they argued, created a landscape, whereas a photographer merely pressed the shutter.
This notion has proved remarkably resilient. Cameras became smaller, lenses sharper, shutters electronic, and discussions in online forums more numerous, yet the argument has remained essentially unchanged. Apparently, the choice of subject, viewpoint, perspective, composition, lighting, exposure and final treatment are all reliably taken care of by the camera itself. A remarkably considerate device.
In the nineteenth century, however, this accusation amounted to more than the familiar claim that an expensive camera produces good pictures all by itself. It touched upon the fundamental question of whether photography could be accepted as an art form at all. Many photographers sought to prove that their work could be far more than a simple copy of visible reality. From this ambition emerged, towards the end of the nineteenth century, one of the most influential movements in the history of photography: Pictorialism.
The name derives from the Latin pictor, meaning painter. The entire programme was already contained within the word. Photographs were not meant to look like ordinary photographs, but to evoke paintings, etchings or drawings. The precise reproduction of reality was no longer the principal aim. What mattered was the artist’s interpretation of it.
There was, however, a remarkable contradiction at the heart of this idea. In order to prove that photography could be an independent art form, photographers initially attempted to remove as thoroughly as possible everything that made it look photographic. Recognition apparently seemed most likely when photography resembled those arts that had already secured their admission to the venerable halls of cultural history.
To achieve this goal, Pictorialists employed a wide range of technical and manual methods. Soft-focus lenses created gentle transitions, while fine details disappeared in favour of a dreamlike atmosphere. Special printing processes were used, negatives were retouched, individual areas were lightened or darkened, and during the making of the print, photographers sometimes intervened directly with brushes, sponges or pigments. The finished work was no longer merely the result of an exposure, but of a lengthy and often highly elaborate process of manual construction.
One of the most important techniques was gum bichromate printing. Paper was coated with a mixture of pigment, gum arabic and a light-sensitive substance, exposed through a negative and then washed. The more strongly exposed areas remained attached to the paper, while other parts dissolved. The process could be repeated several times using different pigments and exposures. In this way, an image could be built up layer by layer and altered deliberately during production.
Bromoil and pigment printing likewise gave the photographer far greater control over tonal values, contrast, surface texture and overall visual effect than an ordinary photographic print. Such techniques were later often grouped under the term “noble printing processes”, a designation that already suggests, with some discretion, that the image was not simply developed. It was attended to.
Today, the subsequent shaping of a photograph may seem entirely self-evident. We process RAW files in Photoshop, Lightroom or other software, alter brightness, contrast, colour and cropping, remove unwanted elements, and call the result, depending on personal conviction, image-making, post-production or fraud. The debate has therefore not disappeared. It has merely acquired new menus.
At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the idea that a photograph might become a work of art through the photographer’s personal intervention was close to revolutionary. Pictorialists argued that the photographer was not merely the operator of a camera, but an artist whose individual outlook and personal signature had to remain visible in the image.
In terms of subject matter, many works followed the ideals of painting. Landscapes were photographed in morning mist, avenues disappeared into haze, and figures moved through the image like shadows. The pictures appeared calm, poetic and often almost melancholic. They frequently recalled Symbolism or the Romantic landscape painting of the nineteenth century.
This did not simply mean waiting for a little mist to drift across a field and hoping that art would somehow establish itself. Visible reality was understood as raw material from which an individual visual idea could be formed through exposure, selection and manipulation. The subject alone did not determine the work. What mattered was the way in which it was seen and shaped.
Among the early representatives of Pictorialism was the English photographer Henry Peach Robinson. As early as the nineteenth century, he combined several negatives to produce carefully constructed images. What would now be called digital compositing and executed with multiple layers in Photoshop was then achieved with glass negatives, meticulous planning and presumably far fewer opportunities to ruin everything by accidentally deleting the wrong layer.
George Davison experimented with deliberately blurred photographs, while the French photographer Robert Demachy brought gum bichromate printing to an extraordinary level of refinement. Demachy manipulated his prints to such an extent that they sometimes appeared closer to charcoal drawings or paintings than to photographs. His work demonstrates how far Pictorialists were prepared to move away from the supposedly objective vision of the camera.
A central figure was Alfred Stieglitz in the United States. Initially one of the leading advocates of Pictorialism, he campaigned vigorously for photography to be recognised as art. Through the journal Camera Work and the Photo-Secession, which he founded, he created important platforms for artistic photography. Later, however, he increasingly turned away from painterly aesthetics and became one of the pioneers of a more direct and modern photographic language.
It is precisely this transformation that makes Pictorialism so compelling. By around 1910, resistance had already begun to emerge against soft-focus, carefully refined and occasionally rather heavily atmospheric images. A new generation of photographers argued that photography no longer needed to hide behind painting. It possessed strengths of its own: precision, detail, clarity of form and the ability to record light directly.
From this position developed what became known as Straight Photography, a deliberately direct approach that embraced the particular qualities of the photographic medium. Its practitioners largely rejected painterly manipulation and instead emphasised sharpness, structure and precise photographic composition. Among its major figures were Paul Strand and, later, members of the Group f/64, including Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and Ansel Adams.
Photography had thus spent several decades fighting for the right to resemble painting, only to discover afterwards that it might perhaps be better served by looking like photography. Art history occasionally takes such detours so that later generations may confidently insist that the destination had been obvious from the beginning.
Looking back, one might therefore assume that Pictorialism had failed. Its visual language declined in influence, soft-focus lenses fell out of fashion, and direct photography established itself as the new model of photographic modernity. In fact, the opposite was true.
Pictorialism had already won the decisive battle. It had demonstrated that a photograph could not be judged solely by what had stood in front of the camera. Selection, composition, light, process, material and final treatment were all part of an artistic decision. Only because the Pictorialists had insisted on understanding photography as art could the next generation begin to argue about what an autonomous photographic art should actually look like.
Even today, we encounter Pictorialist thinking more often than we may realise. Whenever photographers use mist, soft backlighting, movement, shallow depth of field or deliberately reduced contrast to create a particular atmosphere, they draw upon visual strategies that were already important to the Pictorialists.
Not every misty landscape and not every portrait with a blurred background is therefore Pictorialist. If shallow depth of field alone were sufficient, a substantial portion of contemporary portrait photography would possess rather greater art-historical significance than even its creators might dare to hope. What matters is the attitude behind the image: visible reality is not treated as an end point, but as the material from which a subjective visual idea is formed.
This is also where Pictorialism connects with my own photographic practice. I am not interested in rendering the human body as neutrally as possible, as though the camera were expected to produce an anatomical record. Light, shadow, posture, writing, contrast and final treatment shape the image. The body in front of the camera is the starting point, but it is not the whole content.
At the same time, I do not attempt to disguise photography as painting or drawing. It may, and indeed should, reveal its photographic origins. The decisive question for me is not whether an image has been manipulated. Every serious photograph is shaped long before a file is opened in Photoshop. The more important question is whether that shaping serves an idea, or whether it merely attempts to polish significance retrospectively onto an image that had none to begin with.
Perhaps this is the true legacy of Pictorialism. Its practitioners did not merely wish to prove that they had mastered complicated printing techniques or could photograph mist with exceptional taste. They wanted to demonstrate that cameras do not create images. They provide possibilities. What emerges from them depends upon the person using them.
More than a century later, we are still debating whether photography is art, whether manipulation is permissible and whether the camera does not, after all, do everything by itself. The technology has changed fundamentally. The arguments have not always kept pace.