Straight Photography & Pictorialism || Foundations of Photography

welcome to camaraderie it's what's for breakfast this episode is sponsored by what you really should be doing right now but you're here watching videos on youtube instead today we're talking about two artistic movements that have in one way or another pretty much defined photography and shaped the conversations we have about it for the past 150 years roll that intro no time to waste so let's get right into it straight or pure photography and pictorialism are two sets of ideas values and approaches that emerged as the dominant artistic movements in the early days of the photographic community first i would like to give you an incredibly brief rundown of some photographic history just to see how we got to what we're talking about today [Music] the greek philosopher mathematicians aristotle and euclid anyway this is this is way too far back let me skip a couple thousand years right so in the first half of the 18th century there were multiple dudes just kind of independently inventing photography they were nisei phil neeps he's french we've got neeps henry fox talbot or talbot i don't know he's english but i'm pretty sure it's i'm gonna say talbot got neeps talbot and louis de guerre all three of these guys went through various trial runs and experiments and contributed a lot to photography everything from camera design to figuring out large format like glass plate photography to nailing down the process for negative based emotions that allow us to make multiple prints from a single image and thus photography was born now that we've got like a bass line you know we have we have cameras we have photography it exists great now we find ourselves about a decade or so after the end of the american civil war and cameras have pretty much to this point just been used for scientific observations and by that i mean there's basically just a bunch of dudes farting around and seeing what works while they refined the process yes there were war photographers and portraitists but again this was mostly just a matter of like visual record keeping so not really art per se in certain corners though some were starting to suggest that the fledgling industry of photography could serve as more than just a scientific tool enter the pictorialists with a name coined by henry peach robinson hanky peach is what i'll call him from here on out uh good old hanky peach coined the term pictorialism for the painterly effect caused by dramatic lighting and soft focus color tinting and even costume design pictorialism was the first school of thought that attempted to elevate photography to the status of art form the earliest pictorial images were mostly just attempts to recreate and photograph what painters were doing at the same time with impressionism and tonalism so lots of ethereal landscapes and dreamlike scenes and all that kind of stuff they also drew a lot of inspiration from the pre-raphaelite movement and the pre-raphaelites were basically just a bunch of art hipsters who thought that the british royal academy's standards of what constitutes good art was dumb and so they were like hey hey buddy screw your conventional beauty standards man they're just based on the italian renaissance tell you what we're gonna paint like they did before raphael came around and made everything so bland and homogenous as a result of them following that rationale a lot of pictorialists work had a sort of rough classical feeling to them because they were basing their scenes on like pre-raphaelite art even to the point of dressing up their subjects in medieval garb and shooting biblical or portraying biblical and mythological scenes to the pictorialists a camera was more than just a tool for science and documentation it was also an instrument a block of marble not yet chiseled a canvas upon which the photographer could explore their creative vision despite all this the powers that be couldn't just let these amateurs with this new camera thing that captures a scene in an instant compete in art galleries and exhibitions with the painters that spend hours if not days or weeks on a single work of art and they often have formal training years of formal training how dare they presume to call it art especially when they're just copying us and making a mockery of the sacred process is probably what they said and this lack of acceptance among the art community brings us to one of the most important photographers of the time period alfred stiglitz whose greatest accomplishment was being married to georgia o'keeffe before he got to that part of his life though he was a massive proponent of the pictorialist movement in 1903 while trying to drum up sympathy and support among the art establishment for both pictorialism and photography in general he described photography as not the handmaiden of art but as a distinctive medium for individual expression he was also like oh y'all don't want to let us put our work in your galleries and exhibitions cool i'll start my own so he did and that's pretty baller um to use a term that he definitely would have been familiar with stiglitz laid the foundation for photography to be viewed as art and he made it possible by doing everything from forming photography clubs to literally making a space for the pictorialists to show their work to other people which is why at first glance i find it a bit odd that a few years later stiglitz would pretty much just pull a 180 and start to espouse the values of straight photography because these two schools of thought seem to be philosophically maybe not opposite but philosophically [Music] it different they're just not the same you see where pictorialism is all about the photographer's intention and creating a mood with an image straight photography is all about taking advantage of the inherent mechanical abilities of the camera itself and not just taking cues from painting or painters straight or pure photography places a lot of emphasis on the camera's technical powers and argues against any sort of manipulation by the photographer in the conception of the shot although dark room adjustments would gradually become more accepted and even necessary later on basically what you shoot what the camera sees is what you get let the image speak for itself and don't try to force a narrative where there isn't one while pictorialism favored soft focus and playing around with collages cutting up images and pasting them together and finding inspiration from the painters at the time straight photography was about getting the shot as sharp as possible and utilizing the capabilities of the camera to [Music] create an image that depicts reality as it is as we see it without any sort of additional artist's influence now that i think about it it makes sense that stiglitz would gravitate towards this idea you see at the time the world was rapidly becoming more and more and more industrialized and world war one was just like this massive dark cloud over the lives of pretty much everybody rather than make a pretty picture a lot of photographers liked the notion of removing any sort of rose-tinted glasses and capturing the reality of whatever it was that they pointed their cameras at more clarity less superfluous extra fluff seemed to be the order of the day now this isn't to say that straight photographers were all doom and gloom in fact a lot of the work that came out of this movement i find tremendously inspiring and in some cases exceptionally beautiful in a way i see straight photography as a natural response to both pictorialism and the state of the world at the time and really in my opinion photography didn't really start to come into its own as an art form until straight photography came around yes there were some lovely pieces of art created by the pictorialists but the art establishment of the time had a bit of a point in saying that those photographers were more or less imitating the painters at the time it wasn't until there was a concerted effort to utilize the unique technical aspects of what makes a camera a camera that there was much growth in the medium of photography another massive part of the straight photography movement was paul strand who took a much stronger stance against pictorialism than stieglitz did by saying that he thought photographic art should be more than just false figurative depictions of ideal settings for him the camera's advantage of being able to freeze a moment in time and space offered a direct route to a pure deeper photographic experience and it would be foolish to use it on something as silly as pictorialism okay there's obviously plenty more to dig into especially in regards to the other major players in both schools of thought but that pretty much covers the basic principles of the two first real artistic movements in photography on one side you have the pictorialists who were the first photographers to make the push for photography to be considered art they appreciated the ethereal moods and dream-like scenes one could capture with a camera and they experimented with everything from color tinting their images to cutting them up and making collages they fed off of the romantic ideals of impressionism and pulled photography out of its strictly scientific shell on the other side were the straight photographers they said to hell with that nonsense give us something real they fully realized the power that the camera has to capture immediate clear details of life as it happens they wanted their apertures as small as possible so that they could accurately render every crisp detail in any given scene they had no time for frills they were busy recording life what's cool to me about these two styles of photography is how they laid the foundation for every movement sense whether through a direct line like you have with straight photography giving birth to street photography or through a merger of the two ideas like you find in everything from surrealist work to commercial photography without paul strand's stance against art just for the sake of art and his belief that high art has an obligation to engage the viewer both socially and spiritually then we wouldn't have the wonderful works of documentary photographers like dorothea lange or sally mann you know at the same time without pictorialists saying hey it's okay to create scenes that might not exactly exist in the real world it's okay to have fun then we might not have the radical playfulness of guy bored in or the saturated cityscapes of ernst toss another thing that these two sides of the photographic coin have given us is a silly argument that still pervades some conversations the idea that one approach is more valid than the other oh you you crop your images or you change the coloring of your images that's cute but i don't touch my pictures after i press the shutter button so i'm more of a real photographer than you are or oh your pictures are too depressing people only want to see beautiful things granted the vast majority of people that i know in real life and on the internet aren't like this but every so often they come around and to those people if you're watching this first of all thank you maybe subscribe but yo just chill man just chill let people enjoy things there isn't there isn't one right way of shooting every photographer takes elements from both of these movements whether they realize it or not gordon parks one of the all-time great photojournalists wasn't above arranging the scene in front of him to make a statement that's a totally pictorial move irving penn one of the most famous fashion photographers was also super into taking still lifes you know he admired the fine details and he made sure everything was intact sharp focus and that sounds pretty much like straight photography to me my point is mind your own business you know worry about yourself and let other people shoot how and what they want if you don't like it that's totally fine but don't go around thinking that your way is the right way anyways let me get off my soapbox and end this video i'm just fascinated by this kind of stuff the history of why things are the way they are and how it all came to be i just love it drawing comparisons and finding connections across multiple decades and multiple points of view it's just a fun exercise and it gives me a framework within which to view my own work and shows me different avenues to explore in this hobby that i already just get so much joy from photography can take you to places that don't exist and it can make you see life from a different perspective it's it's just fabulous all of it i love it that's all i've got for you today thank you for watching if you've made it this far consider subscribing if you haven't already and let me know in the comments um what your favorite genre of photography is what do you like to shoot what do you like to look at for me i generally like shooting observationally abstract street photography which is a term that i just made up for myself and it honestly it's really hard for me to pick a favorite genre for what i like to view like what i like seeing in museums or online or whatever i like everything from black and white landscapes to conceptual work that blurs the lines between reality and fiction i'll be here on this side of the lens in the next video so until then see you later

Channel: lukeisafinename

Views: 7,286

Keywords: pictorialism, straight photography, pure photography, history of photography, photographic movement, artistic movements in photography, alfred stieglitz, edward steichen, paul strand, henri cartier-bresson, talbot, early days of photography, 20th century art, 19th century photography, ernst haas

Id: VFqYZd3naMY

Length: 17min 56sec (1076 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021