Wikipedia says “Pictorialism is an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the later 19th and early 20th centuries. There is no standard definition of the term, but in general it refers to a style in which the photographer has somehow manipulated what would otherwise be a straightforward photograph as a means of creating an image rather than simply recording it. …. For the pictorialist, a photograph, like a painting, drawing or engraving, was a way of projecting an emotional intent into the viewer’s realm of imagination.” The rest of the Wikipedia article is comprehensive and is linked to some famous examples. I recommend it if you want find out more.
So I set out to try and produce some photographs in pictorialist style. I started with this shot. I was the photographer and model was Arabella.
After some experiments and online research I managed to produce my own Photoshop action. And this was the result:
I then tweaked the photo more before posting it to my flickr stream. (I can’t remember exactly what I did with this one to get the result). It’s the photo at the head of this blog post. Overall I was pleased with the result though I can never be one hundred per cent happy with anything!
Later I tried some actions produced by Gavin Seim. He’s a photographer I have a lot of time for and he produces some high quality actions. There are a lot of people online forever hawking photoshop, brushes, actions and other extensions to Photoshop and I usually find their results pretty pedestrian. Seim’s the only one I rate highly and I use a number of his actions. So his pictorialist actions are based on works by Hamilton (a controversial figure now), Stieglitz, Orton and Coburn. I give a result for each of these below but it should be said that there are different mixes and a likely infinity of changes to the actions if you have the patience to work with them.
Finally I generated an AI version using Openart AI. Actually I generated a lot of versions, all using my original photo of Arabella as reference, but this was the closest it came to a pictorialist photograph.
So which version is best, by which I mean which is the closest to pictorialism? I’d like to think it was the one I ended up posting on flickr but you may think differently.