Given the ubiquity today of cell phone cameras, apps, and digital composition programs on computers, almost anyone can alter photographs for aesthetic or artistic reasons at the touch of a button.
There was a time, though, when changing a photo’s basic look required a skilled hand with printing techniques and different camera lenses — and when there was considerable debate as to whether photography even qualified as an art form on a par with painting, sculpture and other mediums.
In turn-of-the-century America and Europe, a group of photographers was determined to show that photography was something more than documentation. Members of what became known as the Photo-Secession movement maintained that a “straight” photograph was really just raw material for shaping an artistic print through manipulation — crafting a final image to match the photographer’s subjective vision.
By applying varied printing techniques to subject matter that had long been the province of painters — landscape, nudes, still life, studied portraits — these photographers created a painterly style that became known as Pictoralism, one that shared a kinship with Impressionist painting and gained popularity with the public and many critics.
Yet in less than two decades, some of Pictoralism’s leading practitioners would abandon it and begin crafting photographs much more in tune with the growing Modernist idiom, which prized more realism.
At the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts at Springfield Museums, a new exhibit chronicles this history and the work itself with 78 black-and-white photographs that span more than four decades, from the late 1880s to 1934, revealing the dramatic changes the medium witnessed during those years.
“Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography” is drawn from a private collection in New York state and includes the work of some of the biggest names in photography from that era: Alfred Stieglitz, Clarence White, Edward Steichen, Gertrude Käsebier and Heinrich Kühn, among others.
“We thought a big part of the appeal of this show would be to show the way photography was done in an earlier time, when people came up with ways to alter their pictures and turn it into an art form,” said Julia Courtney, curator of art for Springfield Museums. “Especially today, when everyone just takes out their iPhone to take pictures.”
Courtney has set up the exhibit roughly chronologically, beginning with the work of French, British and American Pictoralists in the 1880s, who first began experimenting with altered photographs.
Félix Thiollier’s 1885 “Landscape in Bugey,” for instance, uses a carbon print to create a moody panorama of a marshy field, over which a patch of sunlight, breaking through heavy clouds, seems to create a matching pattern of almost snow-like white on the darkened ground.
The work of individual photographers is sometimes grouped together, though other pictures are mixed to showcase common themes and printing techniques.
For example, Gertrude Käsebier and Heinrich Kühn — the former an American, the latter a German — often used gum-bichromate prints and platinum prints, both of which yielded soft tones and a certain level of abstraction reminiscent of watercolors.
Kühn’s “Saturday in Holland, 1904,” for instance, which shows a woman stooping toward a sidewalk near a cobbled street, a window with an open shutter behind her, has a pebbled quality that accentuates the uneven street pavement.
And Käsebier’s “Untitled (Billiard game),” from 1909, depicts the dark interior of a house, with a woman leaning over a pool table with her stick; her opponent, a tall, somewhat gaunt-looking man, stands several feet away from her, looking out an open door where a small patch of sunlight is visible. The faces of the two are indistinct, much like images from an Impressionist painting.
Stieglitz, the American photographer who became the primary exponent of Pictoralism, is a prominent figure in the exhibit. In addition to his own photography, he published a photo magazine, Camera Work, that, beginning in 1902, became a key forum for art photography.
The exhibit includes a few copies of the journal, with one turned to a page that proclaims it a must-read for anyone who takes photography seriously.
“The manufacturer who has a photographic article to sell and fails to make use of these pages does not understand his business,” the note concludes.
Stieglitz also owned a New York City gallery that featured the work of many up-and-coming artists, and not just photographers: one of his protégés was Georgia O’Keeffe, who would later become his lover and then his wife, though the two had a tumultuous relationship.
The Springfield show features a number of Stieglitz’s photos, including three he took of O’Keeffe early in their relationship, around 1918-19. They’re intimate portraits, including one of her pinning up her hair and another of part of her nude torso; perhaps more importantly, they reflect his increasing interest in Modernism.
As the exhibit outlines, Stieglitz was a polarizing figure who would cast aside artistic friends whose vision differed from his. One was Clarence White, another American Pictoralist with whom Stieglitz collaborated on a series of nude studies in 1907 that celebrated female beauty.
White would stick with Pictoralism through his whole career, and was the nation’s primary teacher of that style well into the 1920s.
Other photographers followed Stieglitz’s lead, though, and focused on more realistic or “straight” images.
Paul Strand, another of Stieglitz’s protégés, made a name for himself with gritty urban portraits, primarily of working people. And Edward Steichen moved away from Pictoralism — one of his early images is a stylized portrait from 1907 of a mischievous-looking George Bernard Shaw — to embrace Modernism completely.
In fact, Steichen’s work might be the most varied in the Springfield exhibit.
As a U.S. Army photographer in World War I, he took an aerial shot of a destroyed French village that is one of the show’s most haunting images. But he also offered highly detailed pictures of flowers from his garden, as well as scenes of glittery urban nightlife in the Roaring Twenties.
His crowning work, perhaps, is a 1931 image of New York’s just-opened George Washington Bridge, shot beneath one of its huge arches, which frames the top of the photo and magnifies the scale of the bridge. At the bottom of the picture is the distant second arch, appearing just inches tall.
It’s like looking down a passageway to a new world of industrial might and marvel that will dramatically reshape the world.
“Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography” will be on view through Aug. 28 at the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts at Springfield Museums. For information, visit:
springfieldmuseums.org