Tag: pictorialism

Categories
photography Social history

Photograms of the Year 1929 – the Interwar Years

What’s going on in the World in 1929? Interesting though Photograms of the Year is, you won’t find many answers therein. Each year a paragraph or two is devoted to photography in various countries. In Germany it was now the time of the Weimar Republic, a term coined by Hitler, characterised by hyperinflation, competing paramilitaries and general unrest. None of this is mentioned in the short essay on Germany which, instead, presents a word salad of little meaning such as “no longer the photography we have been calling artistic until a couple of years ago; not the photography based on the traditional principles of pictorial effect.”

“The Secret” shown above could be straight out of Teutonic mythology but is by a Manchester photographer. In some ways this reminds me of the paintings of Evelyn De Morgan as well as referencing back to the Pre-Raphaelites.

“Portrait”, at least gives a contemporary view of a flapper with its Art Deco overtones.

Wildlife photography is not well represented and I can’t help wondering whether this is a live stoat caught in action or a stuffed specimen posed for effect.

“The Terror of the Desert” is one of my favourites from this collection with it’s almost surreal depiction of desert and cloudscape.

In Pseud’s corner we are offered “A Thrush Sings” and “All Nature is But Art.” There are others but these two will suffice.

It’s quite kitsch but I find “Three Ducks” rather charming.

I’ll finish with this photograph of “Ulla Poulson,” a kind of portraiture that Photograms of the Year does so well.

Categories
photography Social history war

Photograms of the Year 1941: but Don’t Mention the War

It’s the middle of the war and this photograph is the only one in “Photograms of the Year 1941” related to wartime. Everywhere else it’s business as usual. An introduction was added after the volume was assembled and includes the following: “The fact that it includes practically no photographs of warlike subjects is an indication of the place that real picture-making holds in the hearts of the people who practice it. Camera records of various phases of the war at home and abroad may be left to the Press photographers whose business it is, through the illustrated papers and the newsreels, to show the world realistic details of what is being done to the world under arms.”

I take this to mean that only the kind of photos included in the volume are to be considered “real picture-making” whereas war photography is not. This seems not only wrong to me but ignores the artistry of war photographers and the documentary tradition. A corrective for today might be to look up World War II photographers using wikipedia though I note the omission of Lee Miller from both World War II photographers and holocaust photographers. (Her individual entry gets it right though).

Landscape in pictorialist style is well represented as usual as are still lifes:

There are the usual nudes and figure studies. For instance this example of using a classical reference to present a nude:

Personally I find “Idol” to be a much more appealing image and I note that, once again, the female nude is just as likely to be taken by a female photographer as a male one at this time.

“Cherry Time” is another example of the use of classical reference and a pictorialist style.

You won’t be able read the above but it is an example of 21 pages listing camera clubs in the UK which perhaps gives an indication of how popular photography was as a hobby, even in the midst of war. I note that the camera club to which I belong today was listed as being operational in 1941.

Categories
photography Social history

Photograms of the Year 1950

For me this photograph by Chin San Long is the outstanding image from this volume. Wikipedia has this to say about him:

Lang Jingshan  (4 August 1892 – 13 April 1995), also romanized as Long Chin-san and Lang Ching-shan, was a pioneering photographer and one of the first Chinese photojournalists. He has been called “indisputably the most prominent figure in the history of Chinese art photography”,and the “Father of Asian Photography”. He joined the Roral Photographic Society in 1937 and gained his Associateship in 1940 and Fellowship in 1942. In 1980, the Photographic Society of America named him one of the world’s top ten master photographers. He was the first Chinese photographer to take artistic nude shots, and was also known for the unique “composite photography” technique he created.”

It’s well worth seeking out his other work but forget about buying an original print – you couldn’t afford it!

Elsewhere you can find more impressionistic images in keeping with the original aims of the annual.

Portraits are not neglected as you can see from these two examples.

And of course there is more than one obligatory nude.

Photograms of the Year always include long interpretive essays and I was struck by what Bertram Sinkinson has to say: “The tendency to produce bizarre effects in an attempt to be original is receding and in its place we have abundant evidence that the pictorialist is more conscious of his responsibilities in the creative sense.”

I was tempted to do a good, bad and ugly section but some of the ugly work is naff to say the least. One of the weird things that seems to feature in this publication and other photographic books and magazines from the early part of the twentieth century is shots of very young children crying. Why this was popular I have no idea!

Categories
photography

Kate Smith Pictorialist

I recently became aware of a photographer called Kate Smith who was once a well-known pictorialist. Here’s a typical photo “By a Cool Stream.”

According to the Ebayer I obtained this print of “Nymph” from:

“Prominent Pictorialist Kate Smith was born near Watford the daughter of Joseph Gutteridge Smith (1823-1914) a paper manufacturer and Mary Elizabeth Hepburn (1834-1885). She exhibited at the Royal Photographic Society from 1903 until 1934 becoming a fellow of the RPS in 1927. Kate Smith had solo exhibitions at 35 Russell Square in 1925 and 1926 and was described by Cecil Beaton as perhaps “the precursor of Baron Demeyer”. She specialised in photographs of single female figures, nude or in diaphanous costume within romantic landscapes, many of her pictures being modelled by friends in her garden or nearby countryside. They were frequently published in society periodicals such as the Sketch and the Bystander between 1907 and 1914. In 1925 had the unusual honour of addressing the RPS in a lecture describing her approach to photography and working method.”

It is notoriously difficult to obtain information about early pictorialist photographers with the exception of a few famous names such as Clarence H White and Alfred Stieglitz. Web searches often yield little or nothing.

In this instance ChatGPT was able to find more information than other sources and the results were in agreement with the quote above and were referenced so we can probably trust them to be correct:

“Here’s what is known about the British pictorialist photographer Catherine Mary “Kate” Smith:

📸 Background & Life

🎨 Photographic Style & Subjects

🏅 Exhibitions & Recognition

  • First exhibited at the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) Salon in 1903; she exhibited almost annually up to WWI and again post-war sistersofthelens.com.
  • Joined RPS in 1908, became Associate (ARPS) from 1920, showcased her own one‑woman exhibition in 1925, and in that year earned Fellowship (FRPS) sistersofthelens.com.

📷 Equipment & Workflow

  • Often photographed around her home with a 3¼×4¼ Adams Vesta camera fitted with a Zeiss lens flickr.com+1flickr.com+1.

🌾 Notable Work

  • For example, Earth’s Bounty (1912) is a classic demonstration of her style—depicting a softly-lit, mythic figure in a wheat field—exhibited at the 1912 Salon flickr.com+1flickr.com+1.

📚 Summary
Catherine Mary “Kate” Smith was a key figure in British Pictorialism, intertwining romantic narratives, soft-focus aesthetics, and myth-inspired themes in her photography. Her steady presence in RPS exhibitions, eventual Fellowship, and evocative images set in nature mark her as a distinguished contributor to early 20th-century fine art photography.”

The website Sisters of the Lens is a useful resource for finding information about other late nineteenth and early twentieth century female photographers.

Categories
Edwardian photography Social history

A typical morning at Home

I’ve always got several projects on the go. These postcards of a ballerina were dated September 1914 at Bexhill-on-Sea. They’re the latest addition to my collection of vintage dancing girls, a project running for over 10 years now and amounting to 563 entries. My recent article on this collection in the British Music Hall Society‘s magazine only scratched the surface and there’s much more to come.

I’m still experimenting with pictorialism as a style so here’s the view through the gate and down the lane.

Speaking of views from the house here’s a recent sunset. From the front of the house I look west over the local quarry and there are often spectacular sunsets.

All sorts of ephemera turn up when collecting old photographs, like this knitting pattern. I have a theory that these old patterns will become ever more collectable, not for the patterns themselves but for the photographs on the covers. The amount of activity around knitting patterns on Ebay seems to support this idea.

After a hard morning processing scans and photographs it’s time to relax in the garden and here’s Gnasher finding some shade.

And here’s two of our local squirrels cleaning up seeds that have fallen from the bird feeder.

It’s a hard life!

Categories
photography

Pictorialism revisited

In general I take photographs with a treatment in mind. So if I want a pictorialist style photo I take a “normal” raw photograph with a result in mind. What if I looked at some of my older photographs and gave them a pictorialist makeover?

The photograph above was originally taken as a full-colour shot of fields near the village of Reeth. I think this new treatment gives it a dreamy look as if from a different time. It won’t be to everyone’s taste but I like it.

Two photos of Arabella given a Stieglitz style makeover. I’m also influenced by Gavin Seim’s theory of “shadow hacking.”

I gave this photo of ballerina Erica Mulkern the pictorialist treatment and then a mild (digital) cyanotype wash.

Arabella again, this time with a Stieglitz treatment but then converted to black and white.

Categories
photography

Experiments in pictorialism

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.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is OpenartVersion.jpg

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.

Categories
photography

Some thoughts on AI, Art and Photography

I’ll have lots to say on AI in future postings but for now I want to confine my remarks and thoughts to the types of software that can be used to make and enhance creative assets. There are lots of them about and they are easy to use but how good are they and what is my experience with them?

As a keen photographer my go to program is Photoshop and just lately it’s been touting its AI capabilities and I’ve had cause to use those new capabilities. Take the pair of photographs at the head of this blog. On the left I have a photograph of the ballerina Erica Mulkern taken earlier this year. I was very pleased with this shot but I couldn’t help noticing that part of Erica’s right hand was out of the frame making it less than perfect. The photo of Erica on the right is after I used Photoshop’s creative fill action to make her right hand whole again. It took a couple of iterations to get right but it wasn’t time consuming. Can you tell that the right hand photo has been changed artificially? I suspect not but I know and it doesn’t make me happy. I’m not opposed to tweaking photos, no one is except the very few photographers who believe if it isn’t captured in camera it isn’t a pure photograph. In general I and most photographers will use filters, cropping, changing white balance, using third party filters etc., to achieve a desired result. But in all those cases I’m in charge of where to crop, how strong to make a filter and so on. In the case of Photoshop’s generative fill it’s just a matter of dragging a cropped area and letting it create the fill (half a hand for instance) or specifying in text what you want to see. It feels like some of the creativity is being taken away from the human creator.

But there was worse to come and you can see why in the two “photos” below.

I’m not the kind of photographer who’s just interested in one type of subject. I like to try my hand at many different things although I have an abiding interest in Victorian and Edwardian photography. Recently I’ve been reading and researching the topic of pictorialism in art and photography and decided I’d like to try my hand at reproducing something similar to the likes of Steiglitz or Clarence White. So, I looked up some examples of pictorialist photographs, experimented with using Photoshop layers to achieve the desired result, hired a model, travelled to a suitable location, took several hundred photos, imported them into Photoshop and post processed them to get the look I was aiming for. On the left you can see one of the photos of Arabella made to look something like a pictorialist photo. In other words to get to that photograph took a lot of time and effort and collaboration.

On the right you can see a photograph (or is it?) produced by Openart AI when given the prompt “A barefoot woman in a floaty dress in pictorialist style.” Time to generate this picture? About 30 seconds. This is the first time ever that I’ve been impressed by software purporting to be AI driven. Clearly I’ve not been paying sufficient attention.