Pictorialism Photography

8/10/12

PICTORIALISM PHOTOGRAPHY

Pictorialism photography was a great International movement in the mid 1885-1917.  Pictorial photographers generally followed a pattern of creating fog and shadows to create a soft tonal range within the images. They usually  follow similar characteristics of paintings, from framing compositions to the texture of the image, this was because they all originated from paintings of 1800’s. Julia Marget Cameron  1864 was a piscatorial photographer who generally used framing similar to John Everett Millais’s, Ophelia , 1851-2  and this techniqueof framing  became repetition in pictorlist photography.

. Other characteristics used are the soft tonal ranges and the small painterly brush strokes that are used in photography to create this pictoriliasm movement, especially Robert Demahcy in ‘Struggle’. Where he has used brush oils to create this dimensional pictorialism effect. Pictorliasm would be described as very soft textured surfaces, where the hand manipulations are used to create this painterly like photographs.

Here are some other examples of Robert Demachy's work in the style of pictorilism.

THE LINKED RING 

The linked ring was a association formed in 1892-1909 which was a group of pictorilist photographers. The group called the ‘The linked ring’ represented the monsanic beliefs of good, truth and beautiful. These well known pictorial artists, Edward Steichen,Robert Demachy, Clarence H white and P H Emerson and other famous photographers.

IMAGE ANALYSIS

This photograph ‘Study in Red’ 1898 was work from Robert Demachy, a French pictorial photographer.  First impressions of this image is a young women who is facing away from the camera and from current research into portraiture at the time this photograph was taken, we assume the subject is wealthy. Other assumptions we can gather from the image it is quite subtly sexual especially for this time period. As the photograph is portraiture of a young girl, we do not gather much information about her as a person as her head is turned away therefore there is a lot left to interpret to the vowyer. Technically the lighting used is Short lighting, this used to create a illusion to the camera making her body look narrower which allows her feminine structure to be more prominent. This type of lighting would have been popular to use in portraiture photography, however this image takes a different approach to the usual conventional portraiture as we can see her face. 

This photograph is a typical example of pictorialism photography as it is very similar to a painting, where there are soft brush strokes used to create a painterly technique. The painterly technique makes the image much softer, and feminine creating a angelic atmosphere within the image.  Historically its an example of pictorialism as nude portraiture was originally paintings that have developed in time into photography, and here Robert Demachy has used this nude portraiture idea and photographed it in the style of pictorialism.

Robert Demachy was influenced by the impressionist painters and produced photographs technically and aesthetically strong. He wrote several books which showed strong technique in how to manipulate the photography medium by using oil transfers or scratching of the geletaine. These techniques he used is what made his images so painterly like, which was this idea of pictorialism.