Chapter 3

Although the majority of nineteenth-century photobooks were documentary in nature, some of the
most important and influential were not. These espoused the notion of photography as an art, and
were generally in that vein that is broadly termed ‘pictorialist’. Pictorialism is a somewhat tricky term
to define, but two distinct usages of the word are employed here. Firstly, there is the photographic
movement that was known as Pictorialism from the 1880s onwards. This saw photography as ‘fine art’
and reached its zenith between 1890 and World War I, before slowly ebbing away as the more
progressive photographers rejected its values and developed what came to be known as ‘photographic.
modernism’. Secondly, there is what might be termed the pictorialist impulse in photography, which
is the desire to deny and obfuscate the mechanical and essentially documentary nature of photo
graphy. This is not confined to the Pictorialist era, but rears its head frequently throughout photo
graphic history, albeit in different forms. In 1901, in his book Photography as a Fine Art, Charles Caffin
defined the ethos succinctly: “There are two distinct roads in photography – the utilitarian and the
aesthetic; the goal of one being a record of facts, and of the other an expression of beauty.’ Caffin
went on to formulate a scale of values, with functional photography – photographs of machinery,
buildings, war and daily news at the bottom, while at the top ‘there is the photograph whose motive is
purely aesthetic: to be beautiful the photographic equivalent of painting.
Back in the 1840s, however, when the half-science, half-art of photography was invented, the issue
of the new medium’s status as an art form was not a crucial one. In the early days there were many
technical problems that had to be overcome before photographers began. worry about the artistic
merit of their hard-won creations. Getting a technically satisfactory result was the primary goal and
being such a tricky and almost serendipitous process, photography was talked about in terms of the
marvellous rather than the aesthetic. For at least a decade after the announcement of this new
wonder in 1839, it was referred to as an ‘art-science’.
Nevertheless, it was assumed from the first that there was an aesthetic as well as a practical side to
photography. From the time of François Arago’s announcement of the invention of the daguerre
otype, the photograph had a relationship not only with science and documentation, but also with
painting, if only for the implications it threw up around the thorny question of realism in painting.
For those opposing the new tendency towards realism in 1840s painting, photography only showed
how ugly the world was when unimproved by the mediating hand of the painter.
In the first decade and a half of the medium, many of the leading photographers – especially
those using variants on William Henry Fox Talbot’s negative/positive system, that is, photography on
paper-were amateurs, members of the well-educated classes. They were the kind of people who also
sketched and made watercolours, who collected antiquities and geological specimens, who pressed
flowers in albums and arranged dead butterflies in glass cases. One might say that they had the money
and the leisure to dabble in both art and science. But frequently, as we have seen in the cases of Talbot
and Anna Atkins, the dabbling was of a very high order.
The early photographic amateur was also the kind of person who formed and frequented learned
societies. Thus, in the medium’s two countries of origin, France and England, the Société Hélio
graphique (later the Société Française de Photographie) was founded in 1851, and the Photographic
Club of London (later the Royal Photographic Society) was founded in 1853. True to the perception
of the medium at the time, both the SFP and the RPS were ‘art-science’ organizations, and have
remained so to this day. It is in the nature of such learned societies to publish journals and papers,
and to hold annual exhibitions – ‘salons’ of their work. Thus the institutional framework for the
future consideration of photography as a fine art was established, as well as the audience for
photobooks featuring photography practised for its own sake.
In December 1852 an ‘Exhibition of Recent Specimens of Photography’ opened at the rooms of
the Society of Arts. And in January 1853 the inaugural meeting of the new Photographic Society (of
London) was held. Both French and English societies began to arrange annual salons, but it was in
the pages of their journals, La Lumière in France, and the Journal of the Photographic Society (later the
Photographic Journal) in England, that the aesthetics of the new medium were debated. The penchant
for ‘art’ photography was perhaps more prevalent in Britain than in France. The increasing trend
towards professionalism was looked upon somewhat askance by British amateurs, who, ever alive to
class, felt that functional photography was being commandeered by those in ‘trade’. Thus they would
turn their attentions towards a more lofty form of photography.
From 1850 to 1860, photography made enormous strides – technically, aesthetically, philosophical
ly and commercially. During that decade, the ‘art’ photography movement became firmly established
in the photographic societies, chiefly amongst the gentlemen (and lady) amateur photographers, with
their exhibitions, print-exchange clubs and publications. The goal of the art photography coterie was
recognition for the medium as a fine art, on a par with painting. They aimed to achieve this primarily
by moving away from what they regarded as the medium’s besetting sin- its baldly functional, mimet
ic propensity. Unlike the professional journeymen, they looked towards painting and literature rather
than unmediated life for their models, and in the beginning at least, towards any school of painting
except the realist – somewhat paradoxically, it might seem, for those working in a medium that had
helped establish the realist tendency in painting.
The primary genre for art photographers was the landscape, preferably endowed with picturesque
ruins, and it was the combination of nature and the antique that inspired a number of art photobooks
in the 1850s, notably William Russell Sedgfield’s Photographic Delineations of the Scenery, Architecture and
Antiquities of Great Britain and Ireland (1845-55) and William and Mary Howitt’s Ruined Abbeys and Castles
of Great Britain (1862). These books deal with the subject of Englishness, and similar volumes published
in France dealt with the notion of La Patrimoine. But whereas the French studies in patriotic vein
declare themselves much more openly, and are systematic and topographical, stemming from a
laudable attempt to document the country’s architectural heritage for detailed study, the English
efforts tend towards the parochial, the unsystematic and the picturesque.

The epitome of the genre is Philip Henry Delamotte’s The Sunbeam: A Book of Photographs from
Nature, published in 1859. Delamotte edited a journal of the same name, the main rival to Henry
Hunt Snelling’s Photographic Art Journal, and the book he compiled anthologizes issues of the maga
zine. In the main it depicts the kind of idealized and domesticated pastoral landscapes seen in the
work of such painters as John Constable or the English watercolourists.
The 1850s saw the rise of another genre, termed ‘High Art’ photography by its practitioners, such
as William Lake Price, whose A Manual of Photographic Manipulation (1858) was one of the first wholly
aesthetic treatises on photography. Its title’s usage of the word ‘manipulation’ gives the High Art
photographer’s game away: a total rejection of realism in favour of the fabricated tableau vivant using
posed models. These elaborate salon photographs were sometimes made by combining different
negatives to create complex pictures that aped the ‘higher’ themes of painting. The Swede, Oscar G
Rejlander, who scored a great hit in 1857 with his combination print, The Two Ways of Life (which
managed the tricky feat of mixing Victorian moralizing with discreet nudity), and Henry Peach
Robinson, who was also a writer, were the acknowledged masters of this sort of thing. Robinson’s
book, Pictorial Effect in Photography, published in 1869, firmly established him as both the leading
photographer and advocate of Victorian art photography.
Though frequently maligned by her contemporaries, such as Robinson, the most talented art
photographer in England during the 1860s was Julia Margaret Cameron. Towards the end of her
brief career, she published a photographic book that utilized the tableau-vivant strategies of High Art
photography and made a concerted photographic sequence with narrative drive and painterly flair.
The book was Idylls of the King, published in 1874, an illustrated version of Alfred Tennyson’s poem.
Cameron’s costume drama has been widely criticized in the modern era for its mawkishness and
artificiality, but many of the images nevertheless retain her idiosyncratic use of space and the inti
macy that made her such an innovative figure in nineteenth-century photography. For all its awk
wardness, the book remains the first credible example of an important genre that continues to this
day- the book of photographed tableaux.
One of the most important book-makers amongst nineteenth-century art photographers was a
doctor born in Cuba of English-American parentage – Peter Henry Emerson. Emerson had an
innate antipathy for Robinson – a feeling that was reciprocated – and in a book he published in 1889
entitled Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, made a plea that was to be repeated at intervals.
in the history of photography. As such, his treatise – a ‘bomb dropped in a tea party’ as R Child
Bayley described might be regarded as the beginning of the long transition into modernism.
Naturalistic Photography argued that photography was an independent medium, with its own inherent
characteristics that should be strictly adhered to if it was to attain its full potential as a great art form.
The essay therefore exhorted photographers to return to photography’s first principles – that is to say,
to record the world ‘naturalistically’. But there was a problem with Emerson’s polemic. His view of
naturalism was nevertheless based on painterly notions. Though he eschewed the kind of artificial
salon painting upon which Robinson and his followers based their photography, he favoured the
sentimental soft-focus realism of such French painters as Jean-François Millet. In his book, he put
forward an elaborate case for this approach, stating that since the human eye did not see everything
in crisp focus, photographs with a sharp focus from foreground to background – the vast majority of
documentary photographs for instance – were not naturalistic.
Naturalistic Photography was heavily criticized for some of its views on focusing and the degree of
technical control a photographer had over the presentation of his subject. Robinson, himself heavily
attacked by Emerson, retorted by writing that ‘healthy human eyes never saw any part of a scene out
of focus’. Eventually Emerson became frustrated by what he found to be photography’s technical
shortcomings, and he published a black-bordered pamphlet in 1890 entitled “The Death of Natural
istic Photography, in which he renounced many of his earlier ideas. He wrote:
I have… compared photographs to great works of art, and photographers to great artists. It was rash and
thoughtless, and my punishment is having to acknowledge it now… In short, I throw my lot in with those who
say that Photography is a very limited art. I deeply regret that I have come to this conclusion.”
Theory, however, is one thing, and practice another, and three years before writing Naturalistic
Photography the didactic Emerson had made a much more effective polemic that he could not retract,
in the form of a great photobook. Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads (1886), made in collabora
tion with his friend T F Goodall, is, like many of the greatest photobooks, at once a cogent showcase
for the work and an effective statement about the medium. Goodall’s essay at the end of the book –
a preview of some of the ideas that Emerson would expound in Naturalistic Photography – is as
persuasive as Lincoln Kirstein’s afterword to Walker Evans’s American Photographs (1938).

Despite Emerson’s call for ‘naturalism’, most art photographers of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century still distrusted the camera when it presented its most mechanical face (hence Emer
son’s retraction in ‘The Death of Naturalistic Photography). They sought to mitigate this in various
ways, by employing differential focusing, hand-printing techniques and elaborate methods of presen
tation, no less so in their photobooks than in their exhibition prints. Life and Landscape was published
with magnificent platinum prints, both expensive and laborious to make, although all Emerson’s other
volumes, such as Pictures of East Anglian Life (1888), On English Lagoons (1893), and what many regard
as his masterpiece, Marsh Leaves (1895), were made with photogravures. Indeed, photogravure
hand-pulled, it should be noted – became an almost standard technique for the finer books of the
pictorialist era, such as Alvin Langdon Coburn’s London (1909) and New York (1910), and the huge art
documentary project, Edward S Curtis’s The North American Indian (1907-30).
Emerson was one of the most active photographic polemicists in the last decade and a half of the
nineteenth century. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century he had all but finished with
photography; pictorialism had become not only institutionalized, but an international movement,
with the formation of organizations like Linked Ring and Photo-Secession, which promoted the ex
hibiting of prints and the exchange of pictorialist ideas. After 1900, Emerson never again exhibited
or published a print. But although he had opted out of these new developments, he kept in touch with
the medium in a typically eccentric way, setting up a committee to award medals to photographers
whom he judged worthy of accolade. The last recipient, towards the end of Emerson’s long life, was a
true modernist, the Hungarian photographer Brassaï. In 1933 he was surprised to receive a letter from
Emerson informing him that he was to be awarded a bronze medal for his book Paris de nuit (Paris
by Night) (see Chapter 5), one of the key modernist photobooks. Brassaï was both astounded and
bemused by this letter, which he thought was from a madman, especially with regard to its postscript:
‘Are you Italian or French or what?”
It took some time for pictorialism to segue into modernism – three or four decades perhaps. By
the time Emerson had opted out of photography, his role as its chief polemicist had already been taken
over by a figure who was to be at the hub of the transition for much of that time – Alfred Stieglitz.
As mentioned, Stieglitz does not feature in this publication because he never made a plausible photo
book. Some might argue that the quarterly magazine he published and edited between 1903 and 1917
Camera Work could be regarded as a photobook series to equal any in the medium’s history.
Certainly, the production quality of the magazine was better than most books – hand-pulled photo
gravures once more – but the contents of any single issue were perhaps a little too disparate – no great
fault in a magazine but not in accordance with most definitions of the cogent photobook. The poss
ible exception to this was the final edition in June 1917, a double issue largely devoted to the work of
a single photographer, Paul Strand, but even this monograph was larded with reviews and other
articles. Nevertheless, many see this single publication as marking the beginning proper of mod
ernism, the nail in the coffin of pictorialism.
Modernist photography was a departure, both technical and formal, from pictorialist tenets.
Firstly, the concept of ‘straight’ photography was paramount. This embraced the mechanistic,
documentary nature of the camera, and attempted to make the print look painterly through selection,
framing and viewpoint, rather than through manipulation. Secondly, the values of the artistic avant
garde were adopted, ranging from a concentration on ‘modern’ subject matter the city, industry,
machinery to the exploration of abstraction, or experimenting with the representation of space in
the manner of the Cubists.
Strand demonstrated some of these tendencies in Camera Work. He showed views of a bustling New
York, and several abstract close-ups of objects that focused solely on light and form. Most radically,
he included a number of head-and-shoulders street portraits, taken without their subjects’ knowledge,
that were made not for their socio-documentary value, but primarily for expressive purposes. The
shocking Blind Woman, a street vendor with a ‘Blind’ sign around her neck, is widely regarded as the
first truly ‘modernist’ photograph, ‘direct’ and ‘brutal’ in its effect, as Stieglitz put it. Ten years later,
when the young Walker Evans saw a copy of it in the New York Public Library, he was “bowled over’?
Alas, history seldom works so neatly that a single issue of a magazine, even with such ground
breaking work and put together by such a dominant figure as Stieglitz, could turn off the dimming
lamp of pictorialism in favour of the bright lights of modernism. A much more cataclysmic cultural
upheaval, however – World War I had a profound effect on photography. Certainly, modernist pho
tography began to develop rapidly after war, and Strand’s pictures mark a crucial moment in the
transition from pictorialism, but it should also be noted that modernist art and photography dev
eloped differently in different countries, a point that will be revisited in the next chapter.
The legacy of pictorialist thinking lingered for quite some time in the work of the more conserva
tive modernist photographers, in terms of attitudes towards the status of the medium, its presentation
and aesthetic. The radical modernist photography practised primarily by non-photographers in
Russia and Germany was very different from the purist modernism that was developed out of
pictorialism in the United States by Stieglitz, Strand and such followers as Edward Weston. But many
photographers muddled along, borrowing from both pictorialism and the less radical tenets of
modernism, the safer aesthetic rather than the more dangerous political elements. A good example is
Laure Albin-Guillot, probably the most successful commercial photographer in Paris during the
1920s. Her style was a calculated blend of pictorialism and modernism. She has been associated with
Art Deco, especially with regard to her Micrographie décorative (Decorative Microphotography, 1931), a
book of abstract photographs taken through the microscope that was partly intended for use by
decorators employing that style. Art Deco both commercialized and tamed modernism for the
bourgeoisie, thus undercutting, even in its most populist and mass-produced manifestations, the
utopian, broadly socialist ideals of the avant garde. It might have been moderne, but it was never quite
modernist. Further examples of pictorial-modernist photobooks may be found in František Drtikol’s
Žena ve světle (Woman in Light, 1930), Art Deco mannerisms translated into photography, and Erich
Mendelsohn’s Amerika (America, 1925). Mendelsohn was a radical architect, yet in his photography
the battle between pictorialism and modernism is especially acute, and one sees from picture to
picture the butterfly of modernist photography struggling to emerge from the chrysalis of
pictorialism. Even a photographer like Germaine Krull, who produced one of the key modernist
photobooks in her 1928 Métal (Metal), reverted to a more pictorialist style two years later in her more
traditional Etudes de nu (Nude Studies) 1930. Part of the fascination of the portfolio is to watch
Krull struggling to take the nude into more obviously modernist territory.
The transition from pictorialism, even at the time of the modernist photobook’s zenith, towards
the end of the 1920s, was not complete, and would not be until after World War II. Unlike pictorialism,
which was a well-defined movement in photography, there were a number of very different photogra
phic modernisms, and although it looked as if it might all come together into one international move
ment in the ‘Film und Foto’ exhibition in 1929, the moment was illusory. Political and cultural events
conspired to ensure that modernist photography remained a somewhat disparate, fragmented entity.