The Biggest Lie About Pictorialism: It Was Not Photography Pretending to Be Painting
The Biggest Lie About Pictorialism: It Was Not Photography Pretending to Be Painting
The history of photography likes simple stories. One of the most persistent is that, around 1900, photographers who wanted photography to be accepted as an art began making it look more like painting. Soft-focus lenses appeared, negatives were manipulated, and processes such as gum bichromate, platinum printing, pigment printing and photogravure were used. Photography was supposedly trying to overcome its mechanical character and become something resembling a painted image.
The story is convenient. But after reading the sources produced by the movement itself, it turns out to be far too simple.
More importantly, the Pictorialists did not describe their own problem in those terms.
Between 1913 and 1915, the pages of Platinum Print: A Journal of Personal Expression reveal something considerably more interesting. They show not a manifesto against mechanical photography, but an attempt to answer a different question: how could a photographer become the author of an image in a medium whose technology made repetition, technical correctness and convention increasingly easy?
Seen from this perspective, the history of Pictorialism looks quite different.
Not “How can we make photography more painterly?” but “How can we say something in our own language?”
From its first issue, published in October 1913, Platinum Print presented photography as a medium of personal expression. The editors described the reproduced works as the deliberate result of choices made according to artistic requirements and emphasized their personal character. At the same time, they declared a preference for works showing “newness of conception” while retaining “photographic qualities.”¹
That sentence is more important than it may first appear.
If Pictorialism had simply been an attempt to turn photography into painting, retaining “photographic qualities” would have been a problem. For the editors of Platinum Print, however, it was part of the value of the image.
The point becomes even clearer a few months later. In March 1914, Edward R. Dickson warned against effects used merely for effect. He called for a movement away from excessive theatricality toward greater simplicity and sincerity. Significantly, he could also value what he called “straight photography,” provided that it possessed the spirit of Pictorialism.²
That changes the perspective completely.
Pictorialism was not the opposite of photography without manipulation.
It was a way of thinking about what the photographer could do with photographic vision.
The Pictorialists were not fighting the camera. They were fighting what the camera could turn the photographer into
One of the most striking texts appears in the December 1913 issue of Platinum Print. Its title — Government by Process — is almost provocative in itself.
The author criticizes the photographer who allows the chemical process to determine the character of his work. The problem is therefore not the process itself, but the situation in which the photographer becomes subordinate to it. Instead of making conscious choices, the photographer submits to chemical manipulation.³
It sounds almost like something written a century later in response to debates about digital photography.
But what follows in the same issue is even more revealing.
Samuel Holden describes how even a highly corrected lens can be used creatively. The photographer may first make a print, modify it, make an enlarged negative from it, and only then produce another print on hand-coated platinum paper or by the gum-platinum process. His conclusion is remarkably simple: the result depends not on the tool, but on how the photographer uses it.⁴
It is difficult to find a better example of the fact that Pictorialism was not a revolt against technology.
It was an attempt to take control of the way technology was used.
The greatest enemy was not mechanical photography, but mechanical correctness
In November 1914, Platinum Print published a remarkably sharp criticism of camera clubs. The editors accused them of teaching amateurs primarily “mechanical precision,” leaving them without a voice of their own. Photographers were searching for picturesque and spectacular subjects instead of learning to speak about their own world in their own way. The result was predictable: instead of novelty, photography became conventional.⁵
This may be the most contemporary passage in the entire corpus.
Taken seriously, it suggests that for the Pictorialists technical correctness was not the highest achievement in photography.
Quite the opposite.
It could become a trap.
A photographer might set up a camera perfectly, expose correctly, and make a technically flawless print — and still have nothing personal to say.
This leads to a rather uncomfortable conclusion:
Pictorialism was not a movement against mechanical photography. It was a movement against photography in which mechanical correctness replaced authorship.
That is a very different history.
Paul L. Anderson separated technique from ways of seeing
In May 1914, Paul L. Anderson asked: “Where Are We to Get Our Pictorialists?” He was not primarily concerned with training camera operators. He was concerned with what he called the **“subjective education of the artist.”**⁶
This is one of the most important texts for understanding how Pictorialism understood the relationship between technique and authorship.
Anderson distinguished two things. One was technical knowledge of cameras, optics, materials and processes. The other involved observation, composition and the ability to develop a personal way of seeing. The latter could not simply be replaced by the former.
Elsewhere, Anderson formulated the principle even more precisely: **objective technique should be as simple as possible, provided that it allows the photographer to express himself fully.**⁷
That sentence deserves a more prominent place in the history of photography.
It reverses the common assumption that the more complicated the process mastered by the Pictorialist, the better the photographer.
Anderson was saying almost the opposite:
difficulty is not a value in itself.
If a simple technique is enough to realize the intended expression, there is no reason to make the process more complicated.
That remains important today.
Gum bichromate is not valuable simply because it is more difficult than digital printing. Bromoil is not valuable simply because it requires a brush. Platinum printing is not more artistic simply because it is historical.
A technique matters when its specific properties are needed to construct a particular image.
Gum and bromoil were not magical recipes for art
This is another myth that the sources from the period allow us to correct.
Platinum Print certainly discusses a range of processes: platinum printing, pigment printing (carbo), photogravure, gum and other methods. But when the editors discuss specific photographs, they are usually interested above all in composition, light, rhythm, the relationship between figures and space, and ways of seeing. The process is given as information about how the image was made, not as its definition.⁸
This becomes especially clear in the descriptions of individual works. A photograph may be made in platinum, pigment printing (carbo), gum or bromoil, but the critical discussion focuses primarily on what happens in the image.⁹
The Pictorialists were therefore not saying:
“This is good because it was made in platinum.”
They were saying, in effect:
“This process allowed this particular visual quality to be achieved.”
That is a fundamental difference.
The most interesting cases are those in which photographers developed their own processes
In the British issue of February 1915, Alvin Langdon Coburn described Malcolm Arbuthnot, who developed his own way of working with gum and devoted many hours to laboratory practice. Walter Benington, meanwhile, produced large multi-coated gum prints, and Coburn remarked that his work could be recognized almost immediately.¹⁰
This is extremely important for understanding contemporary photographic practice.
The historical process was not treated as a closed recipe that had to be followed faithfully.
It could be transformed by the practitioner.
One could develop:
one’s own process, one’s own working method, one’s own image qualities, and one’s own visual language.
This means that a contemporary artist who changes proportions, materials, the way pigment is applied, or the construction of the negative is not necessarily “breaking with tradition.”
They may be doing precisely what some Pictorialists were already doing.
But the Pictorialists were aware of the danger: every innovation can become a convention
This is where the history becomes even more interesting.
In 1915, Spencer Kellogg Jr. asked in Platinum Print: “Has the art of photography progressed?”
His answer was skeptical. Many works, he argued, no longer offered a new way of seeing because photographers had begun imitating established masters. Technology could become more advanced while the resulting photography became more conventional.¹¹
Pictorialism was therefore beginning to recognize a problem that affects every avant-garde movement:
new solution, recognizable style, imitation, convention.
That is why Frederic W. Goudy’s contribution to Typographica is particularly revealing. Writing about the history of type design, he criticized the process of “copying copies of copies”: successive copying, in his view, leads to the degeneration of form.¹²
Although he was writing about typography, the analogy with photography is striking.
Perhaps the greatest enemy of novelty is not old technology, but the copying of an established solution.
An old technique can therefore be more modern than a new technology
This may be the most provocative consequence of the whole investigation.
If novelty is understood technologically, gum bichromate from the beginning of the twentieth century is obviously old.
But if novelty is understood as a new way of using the medium, the situation changes.
An old process can be used for an entirely new purpose.
The newest software can also be used in the most conventional way.
Therefore:
Old technology does not necessarily produce old photography, and new technology does not guarantee new photography.
This is one of the most important conclusions emerging from the source material.
Pictorialism was not simply a style. It was an environment
Another persistent misconception concerns the nature of the movement itself.
Platinum Print was a magazine, but it also helped circulate exhibitions, supported education, presented photographic work, and reported on schools, lectures, competitions and events. In 1914 it documented international exhibitions, and after one such exhibition photographers who had previously not known one another met and discussed photography.¹³
Clarence H. White ran a school that trained new generations of photographers. In later issues, the editors explicitly invited new photographers to submit their work.¹⁴
Pictorialism was therefore more than an aesthetic.
It was an ecosystem of production, education, transmission and legitimization of artistic photography.
That is an important correction to the conventional picture.
This was not simply a group of isolated photographers sitting in darkrooms and producing “painterly” prints.
There were magazines, schools, exhibitions, galleries, critics, manufacturers, competitions, advertisements, collectors and international networks.
So what is the biggest lie?
It is not that the Pictorialists were influenced by painting.
Of course they were. They studied painting, graphic art, composition and decorative art. Paul L. Anderson, Max Weber, Clarence H. White, Alvin Langdon Coburn and others worked in an environment where boundaries between different art forms were fluid.
The deeper problem is this:
We have mistaken the means for the essence.
Because the Pictorialists used soft-focus lenses, pigment processes, platinum, gum and photogravure, later histories began to define them through those means.
Yet their own writings show that what mattered most was:
personal expression, choice, composition, ways of seeing, individuality, and the retention of photographic qualities.
Technique was subordinated to those aims.
What does this mean for contemporary alternative photography?
This is where the issue becomes particularly interesting.
A historical process can be approached in two ways.
The first is reconstruction:
How was gum made in 1914?
The second is much more interesting:
What can be done today with gum that cannot, or should not, be done in another process?
The first leads to the history of technique.
The second leads to contemporary artistic practice.
And it is the second approach that seems much closer to the evidence contained in the Pictorialist sources.
A contemporary artist working with gum, bromoil, platinum or cyanotype therefore does not have to be a reconstructive historian.
The artist can be someone who reactivates a problem photography was already confronting more than a century ago.
How can authorship be maintained in a technical medium?
How can a process be used without surrendering to its ready-made effects?
How can an experiment avoid becoming just another style to be copied?
And finally:
How can the artist make the technology do something it does not do by itself?
Pictorialism may therefore be more contemporary than we think
When Platinum Print is read alongside later theories of photography, the connection becomes even more striking.
Vilém Flusser would later argue for the need to “play against the apparatus,” acting beyond the program built into the device.¹⁵
Daniel Palmer would examine the automation of photography and the growing role of technological systems in the production of images.¹⁶
Joan Fontcuberta would shift the discussion toward post-photography, circulation and the excess of existing images.¹⁷
Daniel Rubinstein would examine photography as process, event and material transformation rather than simply as a finished image.¹⁸
Suddenly, the Pictorialists’ writings from 1913–1915 no longer look like documents from a closed historical period.
They begin to look like an early articulation of a problem photography is still struggling with.
The question, then, is not simply:
“Is this still photography?”
Perhaps the more useful question is:
“What allows photography to remain photography even when the photographer deliberately intervenes in the way the image comes into being?”
That is where the real contemporary relevance of Pictorialism lies.
Notes
Edward R. Dickson, “Our Prints,” Platinum Print: A Journal of Personal Expression, Vol. I, No. 1, October 1913, p. 13; “A Demand,” ibid., p. 15.
Edward R. Dickson, “Notes on Pictorial Photography,” Platinum Print, Vol. I, No. 3, March 1914, pp. 6–10.
“Government by Process,” Platinum Print, Vol. I, No. 2, December 1913, pp. 9–10.
Samuel Holden, “The Corrected Lens in Pictorial Work,” Platinum Print, Vol. I, No. 2, December 1913, pp. 5, 10.
“Our Camera Clubs: Their Opportunities,” Platinum Print, Vol. I, No. 6, November 1914, p. 3.
Paul L. Anderson, “Where Are We to Get Our Pictorialists?”, Platinum Print, Vol. I, No. 4, May 1914, pp. 2, 5, 11.
Paul L. Anderson, “Where Are We to Get Our Pictorialists?”, Platinum Print, Vol. I, No. 4, May 1914, p. 11.
“Studying Our Illustrations,” Platinum Print, Vol. I, No. 6, November 1914, p. 12.
Ibid., p. 12.
Alvin Langdon Coburn, “British Pictorial Photography. The First Part,” Platinum Print, Vol. I, No. 7, February 1915, pp. 8–9.
Spencer Kellogg Jr., “The Pittsburgh Exhibition,” Platinum Print, Vol. II, No. 1, 1915, pp. 7–8.
Frederic W. Goudy, “Typographica,” Platinum Print, Vol. II, No. 2, 1915, p. 13.
“An Informal Photo-Dinner,” Platinum Print, Vol. I, No. 3, March 1914, p. 12.
“Our Camera Clubs: Their Opportunities,” Platinum Print, Vol. I, No. 6, November 1914, p. 3; “Are You Helping?”, Platinum Print, Vol. II, No. 1, 1915, p. 3.
Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, London: Reaktion Books, 2000, pp. 80–81.
Daniel Palmer, “Redundant Photographs: Cameras, Software and Human Obsolescence,” in Daniel Rubinstein, Johnny Golding and Andy Fisher (eds.), On the Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation, Birmingham: ARTicle Press, 2013, pp. 69–88.
Jorge L. Ochoa S., Post Photography: Joan Fontcuberta and the Shift from Analog to Digital Photography, MA thesis, UCLouvain, 2023–2024, pp. 8–9, 37–38.
Daniel Rubinstein, How Photography Changed Philosophy, London–New York: Routledge, 2023, pp. 97–106.
