2. Two landscape photographers Paradoxically, it

28 août 2006

2. Two landscape photographers Paradoxically, it

Paradoxically, it seems that while photographers were conforming to a pictorial vision, as Cameron did, they were at the same time calling it into question as they were essentially questioning the relationship between photography and painting. The British landscape photographers George Davison (1854-1930) and Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863-1908) sought to assert their distinctive photographic identity. Later they came to be associated with the photographic and aesthetic movement called Pictorialism.

II. A. 2. a) George Davison: a naturalistic and impressionist use of the blur

Both photographers instilled impressionist and ethereal atmospheric effects in their pictures and both of them worked on landscapes as their major subjects. As Davison stated in his paper to The British Journal of Photography in September 1889,

“It is not in man, even in f.64 man, to overlook the unnaturalness of joinings in photographic pictures, and the too visible drawing-room drapery air about attractive ladies playing at haymaking and fishwives.”[1]

Davison was in agreement with Peter Henry Emerson’s rejection of Cameron’s pictorial portraits. However, he did appreciate Oscar G. Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson’s work on prints made up of pieces of different negatives. He was against Robinson’s main idea that the essential characteristic of photography was the use of focus in order to achieve complete accuracy and sharpness. He also followed the steps of Emerson and his theories upon photography which favoured a naturalistic point of view on subjects, usually preferring taking picture of landscapes, rural and seaside scenes.

Nevertheless, Davison chose a different path concerning the use of focus. He preferred a general soft focus rather than Emerson’s idea of a selected focus to set a general idea of nature. He wrote in 1891 that “plus la photographie se révèle capable de traduire une appréhension directe de la nature, plus elle peut influer sur la sensibilité esthétique“.[2]

In order to reach this idea, he used a pinhole camera to produce soft focus pictures. One of his achievements is the picture entitled The Onion Field of 1889. The picture depicts an isolated farm which stands behind a vast onion field. The human presence is introduced with smoke going out of a chimney and some washing hanging out in the courtyard.

Opposing contrasts, from the dark areas of the forest behind the farm to the foot of the onion field in the foreground and light areas marked by the top of each single plant of onion, one of the roofs of the houses which compose the farm, the drying clothes and the sky, the overall image gives a feeling of light reflecting differently, bringing out the shades of light, but largely absorbed by the landscape.

George Davison, The Onion Field, 1889

The picture presents all the characteristics of impressionism. The perspective is flattened by the use of soft focus due to the absence of lens in the pinhole camera. Nothing in particular stands out. We are more under the “impression” of a general landscape since the onion field mingles with the old farm situated in the background. Accuracy of figures, though distinguishable, disappears to the benefit of a “sensitive” apprehension on the general landscape. Davison captured and emphasized the essence of the subject rather than its details.

The Onion Field is closer to the memory of an onion field rather than an accurate representation of an onion field. Soft focus establishes the idea that what matters the most is not the onion field itself but “the idea of an onion field”. Talking about pinhole cameras, Michel Imbert said, “C’est le cerveau qui voit, ce n’est pas l’oeil”.[3] This idea is confirmed by the absence of lens, which usually stands for the human eye in the optical mechanism of a camera. Therefore, the information given - a field of onions - is interpreted by the pinhole camera - a fuzzy field of onion - which can be compared to the human perception. It reinforces the fact that seeing is always an interpretation. As Michel Imbert put it,

“ Quand je regarde le monde qui m’entoure, je le regarde avec mes yeux, c’est à dire mes désirs, mes craintes, mes propres idées, mais lorsque je le regarde tel que représenté sur une photographie, c’est à travers les yeux et l’esprit du photographe qu’il m’apparaît.“[4]

The impressionist photograph by Davison emphasizes his interpretation of a rural scene. A focused representation of that onion field would have been a basic representation of an onion field but the use of soft focus shows the idea of going beyond strict reality, pure description or the science of appearances. Citing impressionist painters like Claude Monet, Davison emphasizes the human perception of the real, in opposition to a strict depiction of the real. He allows representation to go back to its source. That is to say that, in representation, whether it is photographic or pictorial representation, the major interest is not the real – the subject – but what we understand of it and how we perceive it.

II. A. 2. b) Alfred Horsley Hinton: a purely impressionist use of the blur

In the same way, Alfred Horsley Hinton only focused on impressionist landscapes. Though he died quite young, aged 45, he is one of the most brilliant landscape photographers of English pictorial photography. Unlike Davison, he did not care about making a direct print and liked to work on negatives. He usually composed his photographs by working on several negatives, assembling them – what Davison mentioned as “unnatural joinings”[5] - and often drew on them. In the end, he obtained one single and original print. He was probably taught by Ralph Robinson, the son of Henry Peach Robinson when he was working at Robinson’s workshop at the beginning of the 1890s.

Alfred Horsley Hinton, Hymn, 1895 – Fig. 1

All of his landscapes are English landscapes and his particular feature was to entitle his photographs allegorically. His photographs Fleeting and Far, Beyond and Rain from the Hills were both published in 1905 in Alfred Stieglitz’s revue Camera Work (1903-1917).

Hinton ran the London revue Amateur Photographer and supported pictorial photography until his death in 1908. His passion for pictorial and impressionist photography reveals itself in his photograph Hymn taken in 1895 (fig. 1).

A pond, surrounded by a forest in the background and a moor in the foreground, reflects the light of a cloudy sky. Some dark and light areas from the sky echo in the pond. A row of trees makes the transition between the earth and the sky.

Gustave Le Gray, La Grande Vague, Sète, 1857 - Fig. 2

To study Alfred Horsley Hinton’s picture, I would like to compare it to one of Gustave Le Gray’s photograph he did in 1857 called La Grande Vague.

Interestingly enough, French photographer Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884) and Alfred Horsley Hinton were both trained as painters and became photographers. Both pictures associate two elements. The sky takes as much importance as the earth (fig. 1) or the sea (fig. 2). We can recall Turner’s paintings when we observe the sky of these pictures. Both skies are luminous and dramatic and reflect the watery elements. Both photographers worked on two separate negatives, one for the sky and one for the earth.

What is blurred in Le Gray’s picture is the motion of the wave splashing the rocks, whereas in Hinton’s it is the vegetation. In both pictures, we can sense the action of the wind which is implied by the dramatic sky. If Le Gray faces a big wave, as the title of his picture suggests, Hinton’s pond shows wavelets on its edge. It is interesting how the slight blur of each picture is linked to the notion of motion and time of exposure. In Hinton’s landscape, it gives a dreamy and impressionist idea of a British landscape whereas in Le Gray’s picture, it emphasizes the very action of the wave splashing the rocks of the quayside at the city of Sète.

Besides, the structure of both pictures is very similar. The skyline is broken by the forest in Hinton’s (fig. 1) and by the dock in Le Gray’s (fig. 2). If we compare the lines of sight, we can see that they both start from the bottom of the right hand side of the picture and point to the middle left hand side. In the foreground, the row of rocks (fig. 2) echoes to the line of the moor (fig. 1). Parallels can be drawn between rocks and the dock (fig; 2) and the beginning of the pond and the background forest (fig. 1).

As for the titles of the pictures, Gustave Le Gray’s seascape has got a descriptive title whereas Alfred Horsley Hinton entitled his picture Hymn. This may refer to what the landscape recalls to him. Hinton chose an evocative caption, drawing an interpretation of his subject. Le Gray chose a descriptive one. While Le Gray’s picture only refers to itself, Hinton’s approach of the landscape invites us to reflect upon another image, picture or sound we have in mind, drawing a line between photography and history of art or photography and music for instance.

Thirty-eight years after The Great Wave by Gustave Le Gray, photography had evolved, experiencing new techniques and visions among those who practised it. Neither picture is more beautiful or artistic than the other but they demonstrate a different approach to photography. Impressionist vision is what characterised Hinton and Davison’s landscapes. They deeply related to the artistic trend of the end of the 19^th century, and in particular to painting with the Impressionist movement. It is quite interesting to notice that it was French photographer Nadar who first presented the Impressionist painters in his workshop, boulevard des Capucines, in 1874.

[1] Geroge Davison, The British Journal of Photography, vol.36 (September 13, 1889), p. 611, quoted in Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1982, p. 142

[2] George Davison, « Impressionism in Photography », The Photographic Times, n°21, p. 487 (16 janvier 1891) and p. 491 (13 février 1891), is presented in Ann Hammond, “Vision Naturelle et Image Symboliste, la reference picturale”, p. 295, quoted in Michel Frizot (dir.), La Nouvelle Histoire de la Photographie, Paris, Bordas, 1994, chap. 17

[3] Michel Imbert, « C’est le cerveau qui voit, ce n’est pas l’œil », p.55, quoted in Jean-Marie Baldner & Yannick Vigouroux, Les Pratiques Pauvres, du sténopé au téléphone mobile, Paris, Isthme éditions, 2005

[4] Ibid., p. 55

[5] Geroge Davison, The British Journal of Photography, vol.36 (September 13, 1889), p. 611, is presented in Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1982, p. 142

B. The Theoretical Blur

1. A selective focus

With regard to the focus debate, Peter Henry Emerson was the first photographer to support and draw up a theory out of the use of a partial blur. He developed an aesthetic vision that he claimed was naturalistic. After Cameron’s spiritual blur and Davison and Hinton’s impressionist fuzziness, Emerson threw himself into pictorial photography which he proposed to redefine.

II. B. 1. a) Peter Henry Emerson: a scientific approach of pictorial photography

Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) was a brilliant medical student who abandoned his career as a physician for the sake of photography. He sought a scientific founding to art photography, and made a dashing and revolutionary entrance in the photographic world when, as an introduction to his aesthetic approach of what photography should be, he harshly criticized all the emblematic figures of pictorial photography and pre-Raphaelites.

In his lecture to The Camera Club of London, in March 11, 1886, though unnamed, he referred to art critic John Ruskin, who influenced pictorial photographers like Cameron and Rejlander, in those terms:

“One of these spasmodic elegants of Art literature has made it a point to scoff at any connexion between science and Art, and has flooded the world, in beautiful writing in which his power lies, with dogmatic assertions and illogical statements.”[1]

In the same way, he was not afraid to target photographer Henry Peach Robinson’s book, entitled Pictorial Effect in Photography (1869),

“a senseless jargon of quotations from literary writers on Art matters, a confused bundle of lines which take all sorts of ridiculous directions (…) contain[ing] the quintessence of a blend of literary fallacies and Art anachronism”[2]

Having established his full disagreement with former pictorial photography, and adopting the ideas of Hermann von Helmholtz, who explored the mechanics of human vision, Emerson tried to find a new base to photography. He said, “we [photographers] can never equal painting; but all other branches of pictorial Art we are able to surpass”. “Painting alone”, he continued, “is our master”.[3] His whole point was to represent as true as possible the impression of Nature on the human eye. The real was supplanted by the perception of the real. His approach was called naturalistic.

To reach this idea of a naturalistic approach, he advised photographers to go outside their studios and workshops and photograph real people in their natural environment. He dismissed the contrived and posing costumed models of Victorian society.

As regards the use of focus, Emerson explained his views in his book, Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, twenty years after Robinson’s, in 1889. He advised a focus with judgement, a slight out of focus,

“not [to] be carried to the length of destroying the structure of any object, otherwise it becomes noticeable, and by attracting detracts from the harmony, and is then just as harmful as excessive sharpness would be. (…) Nothing in nature has a hard outline, but everything is seen against something else, and its outlines fade gently into that something else, often so subtlety that you cannot quite distinguish where one ends and the other begins. In this mingled decision and indecision, this lost and found, lies all the charm and mystery of nature.”[4]

His textbook was described as “a bombshell dropped in a tea party”[5] and resulted in much criticism. Robinson claimed that “healthy human eyes never saw any part of a scene out of focus”.[6] And Emerson replied “I have yet to learn that any one statement or photograph of Mr. H. P. Robinson has ever had the slightest effect upon me except as a warning of what not to do.”[7] As a result, some photographers followed Emerson’s point of view on out of focus and started to shoot soft focus photographs, sarcastically called by others “fuzzygraphs”.

The debate over focus was a very tricky and impassioned one in 19^th century British photography. Emerson had made a vehement protest against the former genre of pictorial photography, yet the photographical world continued to subscribe to a pictorial composition as the photographs of the period remained very similar in framing and composition to painting. The combination of these two factors initiated a new way of making picture. Emerson’s style stands in-between pure photography – or ‘straight photography’ as Sadakichi Hartmann stated - and pictorial photography. [8]

II. B. 1. b) Peter Henry Emerson: the obsession of focusing like the eye

In my study of Emerson’s naturalistic fuzziness, I will compare his photograph entitled A Stiff Pull (1888) to Jean François Millet’s painting called Les Glaneuses (1857) presented in the Musée d’Orsay.

[1] Peter Henry Emerson, « Photography, A Pictorial Art », 1886, quoted in Beaumont Newhall, Photography: Essays and Images, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1980, p. 159

[2] Ibid., p. 160

[3] Ibid., p. 160

[4] Peter Henry Emerson, Naturalistic Photography, p. 193, is quoted in Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1982, p. 142

[5] R. Child Bayley, The Complete Photographer, New York, McClure and Phillips, 1906, p. 357, is quoted in Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1982, p. 141

[6] Henry Peach Robinson, Picture-Making by Photography, 2d ed., London, Hazell Watson and Viney, 1889, p. 135 is quoted in Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1982, p. 142

[7] The Amateur Photographer, vol. 9, April 26, 1889, p. 270 is quoted in Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1982, p. 142

[8] Sadakichi Hartmann, “A Plea for Straight Photography”, 1904 is quoted in Beaumont Newhall, Photography: Essays and Images, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1980, p. 185-188

Peter Henry Emerson, A Stiff Pull, 1888

Jean-François Millet, Les Glaneuses, 1857

Jean François Millet (1814-1875) was one of Emerson’s big influences. He actually referred to him in is Photography, A Pictorial Art among other painters such as John Constable (1776-1837) and Camille Corot (1796-1875). As a matter of fact, Millet and Corot’s work had been exhibited in London in the 1870s.

A Stiff Pull was published in the book Pictures of East Anglian Life in 1888 and presented a lot of folkloristic studies. Two horses are dragging a plough while a farmer is digging a furrow in fallow land. Gravel is scattered over the surface. A cloudy sky opposes the sloping ground in equal proportion. The scene is taken from behind. The horses stand in the centre whereas the ploughman, who is wearing a hat, lies in the foreground on the left hand side of the picture.

In Jean François Millet’s picture, Les Glaneuses, gestures and details in the picture are absorbed in the action. The hands and face of the female gleaners are coarse and roughly done. Their shoes almost merge with the colour of the land. In the same way, the colour and shades of the sky reminds the brown and yellow tones of the field. A feeling of blur and lack of accuracy prevail.

Similarly, a general look at Emerson’s picture shows that it does not give any sharp vision of the rural scene he photographed. The horses and the top of the ploughman’s body stand out of the skyline level but the overall greyness of the ground corrupts the living elements. In his effort, the ploughman seems disproportionate and deformed. Besides, the motion of the effort sets the general fuzziness of his body.

However, a closer look at Emerson’s pictorial picture may change our first impression. In spite of a general soft focus, some parts appear to be focused and sharp. In fact, if the left leg is blurred by the pull of traction, the other one, the stiff one as the title says, is sharply focused. Even if it is difficult to distinguish the ploughman’s right shoe, deepened in the gravelled ground, we can observe that around this shoe all the ground and stones are totally focused. Therefore, Peter Henry Emerson, through the title of his photograph, pointed out the area that the viewer should look. With the caption, he actually indicated where the viewer should in turn focus.

In The Amateur Photographer, January 1890, D. Habord described the picture as such,

“An awful abortion representing a man plowing up-hill with a pair of horses. The man’s foot was as long as the horse’s head and the whole picture was gloriously so ‘naturalistic’, i.e., ‘fuzzy’ or ‘focused with judgement’ that it was denounced as an imposture.”[1]

Nonetheless, the plate received a silver medal at The Amateur Photo Exhibition in London in 1886.

Setting the pictures of Emerson in the history of photography, he appears as a pioneer photographer. Although he abandoned his beliefs that photography was an art in 1891, after he was told by scientists that control of tones by development was impossible, he was the first photographer to have linked up science and art, the document and art photography. With his care of a naturalistic subject, framing and hypothesis on what focus should be, he seemed to have brought in the very beginnings of social photography.

In his ideal of representation, Emerson tried to gather both the Truth and the Beautiful, as Baudelaire opposed in these terms two contradictory aspects of art in his speech of the Salon des Beaux-Arts of 1859. A true representation was achieved by the choice of subjects and a beautiful one thanks to the art of the photographer. Following the tradition of pictorial art, a concern in framing, the rendering of the light in its shaded tones (Photography, a Pictorial Art) and through the use of blur Emerson banished the idea of a commercial photography and its primary function as a document.

2. A blur ideology

In the 1880s, through on-going debates and discussions upon the use of blur, photography had reached the status of art in photographers’ mind. Painting and photography were easily comparable and similarities were drawn between the two. Photography little by little had gained credibility. Now sharing a mutual ground with painting, through combining aesthetic and mastery, photography was waiting for its independence and recognition from a larger audience. Even though photographs had been exhibited since the very beginning of the 1850s and photographic societies flourished, photographers wanted to offer their art a ‘room of its own’, to borrow Virginia Woolf’s words in another context. As such, a group of photographers decided to set an example and ventured into the prospect of photography as an art.

II. B. 2. a) The Linked Ring Brotherhood: a showcase to blurred photographs

In 1888, the first hand camera was released on the market by George Eastman’s company Kodak. A year later, photographic film was made of celluloid and mass produced. A new photographic industry developed and specialized in processing film rolls and printing. Consequently, there was no more need to have a special room in the house dedicated to photography, no need to manipulate and buy expensive chemicals or glass plates and no need to possess knowledge to make meticulous hand-prints. It was thus a major breakthrough in the evolution of photography. These great improvements introduced a new approach in framing pictures and allowed photographers to explore their environment, leading at the beginning of the 20^th century to documentary and street photography. As a result, a larger population could now access photography; a population which, on the whole, held no regard for photography as an art.

Owing to the fact that photography was now available to a new social class, it was no more the privileged pastime of a certain elite called the amateur photographers. More and more images were being produced, sold and reproduced. More and more photographs illustrated newspapers for example. In view of the democratisation and industrialization of the medium and out of fear that good taste and art would be crushed by popularization, some amateur photographers distanced themselves and got together to discuss representation and art photography.

In 1891, the first exhibition of art photography took place in Vienna. It was initiated by the German photographic society Kamera Club. Some British amateur photographers from the Royal Photographic Society, who felt disenchanted and oppressed by the majority of photographers who were basically technologist photographers, complained that their work was not recognized and decided to break away and form their own collective.

With regard to the American Civil War of the 1860s, they later claimed themselves to be photo-secessionists, as American Alfred Stieglitz’s speech suggested in 1903.

Alfred Stieglitz claimed that the photo-secession was accomplished

“(…) to register their [photographers] protest against the reactionary spirit of the masses. This protest, this secession from the spirit of the doctrinaire, of the compromiser, at length found its expression in the foundation of the Photo-Secession. Its aim is loosely to hold together those Americans devoted to pictorial photography in their endeavour to compel its recognition, not as the hand-maiden of art, but as a distinctive medium of individual expression.”[2]

Under the impulse of Alfred Maskell, British ‘secessionists’ assembled and founded the Linked Ring Brotherhood in 1892. This new society, whose founder members were Alfred Maskell, H. P. Robinson, Lionel Clark, George Davison, Henry Hay Cameron (Julia Margaret Cameron’s son) and Alfred Horsley Hinton, declared itself to be the standard bearer of art photography in England. The name of the Linked Ring was chosen to symbolize the unity of its members.

The Linked Ring Brotherhood welcomed international photographers who had also broken away from the mainstream - seceded - and adopted new members such as British photographers Frederick Evans, Alvin Langdon Coburn and Frank M. Sutcliffe; American Baron Adolf De Meyer, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward J. Steichen, Gertrude Käsebier and Clarence H. White; French Robert Demachy and Constant Puyo; and German Heinrich Kühn, and Theodor and Oscar Hofmeister.

To promote art photography, the aims of the Linked Ring were threefold. First, they held annual exhibitions from 1893 to 1909. They called them “salons”, a name deliberately borrowed from the world of painting. Second, they published portfolios, photoengravings and photography revues. Alfred Horsley Hinton took over the editorship of The Amateur Photographer in 1893. Finally, they spread the Pictorialist ideas which expanded with the creation of other international photographic societies such as The Photo Club of Paris and The Photo-Secession of New York.

Following the example of painting, once thought to be a purely mechanical process, they sought to demonstrate photography’s uniqueness. From the dominant idea of photography as scientific, liberal and opened to anyone emerged the Pictorialist movement which encompassed all artistic photography, whether it was impressionist, naturalistic or symbolist.

II. B. 2. b) The Pictorialist Movement: a claiming of blur

Pictorialism was considered the first photographic movement.

It took place between 1888 and 1918, as the first French exhibition on the Pictorialist movement, entitled “La photographie pictorialiste en Europe 1888-1918”, presented in the city of Rennes this year suggested.[3] Pictorialists questioned the nature of the real and the nature of photography. In 1918 Pictorialism gave way to another art and literary movement, the Dada movement.

The name ‘pictorialism’ had long placed photography alongside painting whereas their relationship to one another was ultimately different.

Marc Mélon established the relationship between photography and painting as follows,

“Il ne s’agit pas comme beaucoup l’ont pensé, d’un strict mimétisme entre une photographie complexée et une peinture supérieure devenue le modèle inaccessible de la première. Il s’agit plutôt d’un rapport concurrentiel qui pousse la photographie non à imiter la peinture, mais à s’élever à son niveau et, sur un pied d’égalité, à revendiquer le même prestige. C’est le grand projet du pictorialisme : considérer la photographie comme un des beaux-arts.”[4]

Mélon continued,

“La présence du mot ‘picture’ dans la dénomination anglaise du mouvement rappelle quel était son objet initial : faire connaître la photographie comme image parmi les autres images.”[5]

So as to make photography’s name among the field of other images (painting, drawing, etching, woodcutting…), the pictorialists advocated complex processes which allowed interpretation and subjectivity. Working on the negatives and prints; using salts, gum-bichromate, charcoal or inks to reproduce this interpretation of the real were very common. They played with various textures of papers and favoured drawing on materials. They scratched, coloured and altered negatives and prints. They explored all the possibilities of the photographic object(s) and thus photography itself. All these processes led to the creation of single prints, which illustrated that a photograph could be as original and unique as a painting. Photographers were no more operators but creators, artists and authors. They succeeded in manipulating and transcending the real, as painters had already done.

Clearly, when negative images were not already blurred, all these manipulations eventually triggered off blur on the general aspect of the accomplished piece. Hard outlines were softened; sharpness and photographic grain stumped by the hand of man, obsessed by the making of artistic print.

If out of focus already existed with the manipulation of the camera – obscura or not –, it is only with the invention of photography in 1839 and with the appearance of the Pictorialist movement that an aesthetic of the blur and subsequently, a form of blur ideology – derived from that regular and constant use of it – emerged in the 1880s.

The flaw of the image – blur – was used as an asset to show that photography was not a mechanic tool but an aesthetic pleasure; a proof that photography’s main function was not strict reproduction but the art of reproduction. The flaw was thus integrated by the pictorialists in order to make the audience admit that photography was an art.

As with any great artistic movement, pictorialists needed a manifesto. They found it in Robert de la Sizeranne’s article “La Photographie est-elle un art?” published in La Revue des Deux Mondes in 1897.

On the aesthetic of blur, Robert de la Sizeranne concluded,

“Le flou est justement au net ce que l’espoir est à la satiété. Il est l’équivalent, en art, d’une des choses les plus aimées de la vie : cette délicieuse incertitude d’une âme où déjà pénétra l’espoir et où l’assurance n’est pas entrée encore ; où le désir qui commence d’apparaître comme réalisable n’a pas cessé d’être avivé par les obstacles à sa réalisation ; où tout se promet et où rien ne se donne, où tout se devine et où rien ne s’avoue ; où les figures et les paysages et le ciel et la terre et l’amour même apparaissent selon les incertaines suggestions de l’aube, et non selon la sèche définition des midis…”[6]

Robert de la Sizeranne’s laudatory speech on the use of blur shows how significant it was for the pictorialists and mostly how blur was a bridge between photography and art. It was a springboard to elevate photography to the level of art. In his speech, the blurred image entails other images and on top of that, feelings. Robert de la Sizeranne talks about uncertainty, promise, hope and desire. Blurred photographs prompt reactions, emotions which are the ultimate purpose of art. He says blur embodies “la grâce, l’indécision, la fraîcheur, ce que les artistes recherchent d’abord”[7] He puts into words his impressions regarding blurred photographs. By doing so, he accomplishes the work of an art critic and therefore legitimates photography as art.

As a consequence, a new market opened to photography. Photographs, promoted by magazines and revues, were reproduced in postcards for example. Photographs were widely exhibited by societies, like in the universal Exhibitions of Paris in 1889 and 1900, of Anvers in 1894 or of Liège in 1905. They also connected with galleries and sold prints. In 1896, the curator of the National Museum of the United States of America dealt the first purchase of photographs as works of art for a sum of $300. The same year, Belgium opened a photographic Museum. Photographs became cultural products.

Pictorialism succeeded in offering photography a room in the artistic world. Along with other processes, fuzziness enabled photography to find a place among other images.

Little by little, artistic pictures became the ones only produced by the pictorialists. A very few examples aside, like Frederick H. Evans for instance, the majority of pictorialists adopted fuzziness as a necessary condition of their work. “[Les] effets artistiques ne s’obtiennent, en géneral, qu’aux dépens de la minutieuse et scientifique définition des détails”, wrote Robert de la Sizeranne. This sentence completely defines the work of pictorialists but paradoxically announces their inability to evolve.

For the pictorialists, blur became the artistic value and consequently sharpness became the scientific one. Sharp images were the proof of strict representation; a representation without any interpretation, thus no artistic view could be derived from it. Science was facing art and blur sharpness. Sharpness was thought to undermine art photography. On account of their endeavour to promote art, pictorialists refused science and focused images.

Nevertheless, scientific progress reduced the time of exposure under the measure of the second which evidently entailed sharpness. While legitimating blurred pictures as an art, at the same time photographic processes, elements and materials were evolving and thus making photography more accurate. Cameras were getting smaller and easier to manipulate. Lenses were more and more accurate and sophisticated. Films and papers were improving in levels of quality, definition and finishing. In fact, photographic images were to become more and more accurate and sharp.

In 1908, the majority of photographs presented in the annual Linked Ring exhibition were Americans. As a protest, British photographers, whose work had been rejected by the Selecting Committee, organized a “Salon des Refusés” which took place in The Amateur Photographer’s editorial office. As a result, a lot of talented American photographers resigned from the Linked Ring Brotherhood which eventually dissolved in 1909.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, new photographic aesthetics emerged and the goals of the Linked Ring Brotherhood became somehow obsolete. Besides, photography was not English any longer but mostly American.

[1] Quote taken from Beaumont Newhall, Photography: Essays and Images, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1980, p. 161

[2] Alfred Stieglitz, “The Photo-Secession”, 1903 quoted in Beaumont Newhall, Photography: Essays and Images, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1980, p. 167

[3] La Photographie Pictorialiste en Europe 1888-1918, Le Point du Jour, 2005. Texts by Patrick Daum, Michel Poivert, Francis Ribemont and Nathalie Boulouch.

[4] Marc Mélon, « Au-delà du réel, la photographie d’art », p. 87 is quoted in Jean-Claude Lemagny & André Rouillé, Histoire de la Photographie, Paris, Larousse, 1998, p. 82-102

[5] Ibid.

[6] Robert de la Sizeranne, La Photographie est-elle un art ? , La Rochelle, Rumeur des Ages, 2003, p. 16-17

[7] Robert de la Sizeranne, « La Photographie est-elle un art ? », p. 568, Revue des Deux Mondes, t. 144, 1897, p. 565-595