Why do contemporary photographers once again want photography to look like a painting?
From Gum Bichromate to Photoshop
Why do contemporary photographers once again want photography to look like a painting?
In September 2026, the Pomeranian Photographic Society (Pomorskie Towarzystwo Fotograficzne, PTF) in Gdańsk presented a group exhibition titled Neo-Pictorialism. The title immediately raises a question, but the idea behind it is even more intriguing. The exhibition looks back to historical Pictorialism and to Robert Demachy, while at the same time pointing to contemporary tools such as the computer and the printer. The aim is not to reconstruct gum bichromate, bromoil, or another historical process. Instead, it is to recreate a Pictorialist visual language through contemporary technology.
That choice of terminology can certainly be debated. Yet the exhibition becomes much more interesting when placed within a broader international context. Pictorialism is increasingly reappearing as a living category in contemporary photography. It can be found in the names of online communities, artistic projects, exhibitions, and organisations. Some photographers return to historical processes, others combine them with digital image-making, while some work entirely within the digital environment. What they share is the conviction that photography does not necessarily end with what the camera records.
Seen in that light, the PTF exhibition is not simply an isolated local event. It is part of a much broader development. The more interesting question, perhaps, is not why Pictorialism has returned, but why so many photographers today once again want photography to look like a painting.
Demachy and the idea of the photographic image
The distinction matters because contemporary discussions of Pictorialism often reduce it to a handful of visual characteristics: softness, mist, blur, sepia, or a painterly appearance. Historical Pictorialism was much more than a particular look.
It was an artistic movement that sought to establish photography as a legitimate form of art. Around this idea, photographers created societies, clubs, exhibition networks, and journals. Pictorialism developed as an international culture in which photographers not only produced particular kinds of images, but also debated what photography could and should be. The Metropolitan Museum of Art emphasises the importance of organisations such as the Photo-Club de Paris, the Linked Ring, and Photo-Secession in shaping this international artistic environment.¹
Robert Demachy provides an especially useful example. His aim was not simply to make photographs soft or “like paintings”. Gum bichromate gave him a way of physically intervening in the image. It allowed him to introduce pigment, control tonal values, remove information, and leave traces of the artist’s hand. In Une Balleteuse, for example, the Metropolitan Museum describes how Demachy altered and simplified parts of the background so that they would serve the composition rather than compete with its main subject.²
In Struggle, he used gum bichromate to give the image the character of a drawing, deliberately moving it away from the appearance of an untouched photographic record. The Metropolitan Museum identifies Demachy as one of the leading French Pictorialists and highlights his role in reviving gum bichromate as an artistic photographic process.³ This distinction is crucial. The historical Pictorialist was not simply trying to make a photograph resemble a painting. The deeper idea was that a photograph could become the raw material for an individual artistic image. Gum was one means of achieving that; it was not the principle itself.⁴
Pictorialism eventually lost its position as the dominant model of artistic photography. With the rise of modernism, greater value was placed on sharpness, detail, formal clarity, and the particular qualities of the photographic medium. The soft and manipulated Pictorialist image came to be associated with an earlier era. Yet one important idea survived: photography could be an interpretation rather than a straightforward record, and the photographer could actively reshape the image. By the middle of the twentieth century, Jerry Uelsmann’s darkroom manipulations were already far removed from Demachy’s gum prints, but the principle remained. Photographic material could be transformed by the artist. Digital photography did not begin this story from scratch. In many respects, it inherited a question that Pictorialists had already raised decades earlier.
In 2009, Andy Romanoff wrote about the new possibilities for photographic manipulation offered by Photoshop and the digital darkroom, drawing parallels with the period of Pictorialism.⁵ Around the same time, photographic publications were already using the expression “Neo-Pictorialist movement” in connection with digital image-making.⁶ These references do not prove the existence of a single, coherent movement. They do show, however, that the relationship between digital manipulation and the legacy of Pictorialism had already become a subject of discussion more than a decade ago.
From historical process to contemporary visual language
This broader context changes the way the PTF exhibition can be understood. The works presented in Gdańsk share a recognisable visual vocabulary: softness, blur, movement, reduced sharpness, mist, atmosphere, selective colour, deep tonal values, sepia, brown and violet hues, and various forms of digital transformation.
The individual works are by no means identical. Some use photography primarily to depict landscape, others move towards abstraction, while others focus on mood or make digital manipulation part of their expressive method. Across the exhibition, however, there is a clear movement away from photography understood as a neutral and optically precise record and towards photography understood as a constructed image. This is where the term Neo-Pictorialism becomes plausible, provided that we do not treat it as a direct continuation of a historical photographic process. It is more useful to see it as a contemporary reinterpretation of the Pictorialist idea of the photographic image. For the purposes of this discussion, I would describe this approach as aesthetic Pictorialism. The distinction becomes even more useful when we look at contemporary photography more broadly. There are several ways in which Pictorialism has been revived. In some practices, material continuity with historical processes remains fundamental. In others, historical processes are combined with digital preparation. In still others, what survives is primarily the visual language and the underlying conception of photography.
The first approach could be described as process-based Pictorialism. It includes photographers for whom the physical process remains fundamental: gum bichromate, pigment printing, bromoil, cyanotype, photogravure, wet-plate collodion, and other historical or alternative processes. Here, the connection with photographic history is partly material. The process itself remains part of the meaning of the work.
A second approach might be called hybrid Pictorialism. Digital tools are used, but they ultimately lead to a physical photographic process. Photoshop is not the final destination but one stage in preparing a digital negative, matrix, or source image that will later be translated into a historical or alternative process.
A useful example is the Royal Photographic Society exhibition Squaring the Circles of Confusion: Neo-Pictorialism in the 21st Century, held in 2022 and curated by Zelda Cheatle. The exhibition presented contemporary practices that the RPS described as Pictorialist through aesthetics or process. Among them were cyanotype, daguerreotype, pinhole, photogravure, and camera-less image-making.⁷ The exhibition materials also explicitly discussed the use of Photoshop, scanners, and printers in preparing digital negatives for traditional processes.⁸ There is also a third approach: aesthetic Pictorialism. Here photography can be entirely digital. There is no gum, pigment, matrix, or historical process. There may be nothing more than a camera, a digital file, a computer, and a printer. Yet the resulting image, and more importantly the way it is conceived, can still be distinctly Pictorialist.
In my view, this is the model represented by the PTF exhibition. That does not make the exhibition less interesting. Quite the opposite. Its significance lies in showing how far Pictorialism can be separated from its historical processes while retaining the conviction that photography can be deliberately constructed as an image.
Why Pictorialism is attractive again
This question seems more important than the argument over terminology itself. We still lack representative sociological research on contemporary communities that identify themselves as “modern” or “neo-Pictorialists”, so some of the following observations should be regarded as hypotheses rather than established facts. Even so, the scale of the phenomenon is difficult to overlook.
Large online communities have formed around Modern Pictorialism. Flickr has hosted the Camera Work - Contemporary Pictorialism group since 2006, with roughly 1,200 members and more than 21,000 photographs. Its discussions include questions such as “Are These Pictorialism?” and “Modern Pictorialism” - almost exactly the kind of debate raised by the PTF exhibition today.⁹
One revealing discussion centres on the idea that a “real” photograph should come straight from the camera. For some participants, discovering Pictorialism opened up another way of thinking about photography: not simply as something recorded, but as an image that can be deliberately constructed, much as a painter constructs a picture.¹⁰ That is important because it suggests that the contemporary Pictorialist may not actually be looking for the nineteenth century. What they may be looking for is an alternative to the dominant model of photography.
The contemporary camera has become extraordinarily efficient at recording reality. High resolution, autofocus, image stabilisation, HDR, computational photography, and automatic correction all push photography towards ever greater technical precision. At the same time, photographs now circulate through an immense stream of images produced by smartphones and social media. In this context, Pictorialist photography can serve a paradoxical purpose. It offers a way out of the camera’s technical perfection. Blur is no longer a defect. Lack of sharpness can carry meaning. Colour can become interpretation rather than description. Removing detail can become a compositional decision. Digital manipulation does not necessarily imply an attempt to deceive the viewer. It can mean the opposite: an explicit rejection of the idea that photography must present itself as neutral evidence.
There is an interesting structural parallel with the end of the nineteenth century. Photography was then becoming increasingly widespread and technically efficient. Pictorialists responded by emphasising individuality, interpretation, and the artistic character of the print. Today photography is even more ubiquitous and technologically sophisticated, and some photographers are responding in a surprisingly similar way: the image does not have to reveal everything the camera is capable of seeing.
The historical situations are obviously not identical, and there is no reason to assume that contemporary photographers consciously reproduce the motives of Demachy and his contemporaries. The similarity lies elsewhere, in the recurring need to reconsider the role of the artist when photographic technology becomes increasingly efficient.
Pictorialism was also a community. Historical clubs, societies, exhibitions, and journals provided spaces in which photographers could not only display their work, but also discuss what photography should be.¹¹ Something similar is happening today, although through different technologies and on a very different scale. Facebook, Flickr, forums, Instagram, workshops, and schools have created new spaces for exchanging ideas, learning techniques, and developing shared identities.
There are also organisations that explicitly use the term “Neo-Pictorialism”. The Neo-Pictorial School of Photography promotes a combination of historical and alternative processes with contemporary digital practice, while emphasising materiality, experimentation, and subjective interpretation.¹² Pictorialism is therefore no longer simply a historical term used to describe a movement of the past. For some contemporary photographers, it has become a way of defining their own practice.
Gum and Photoshop
This is where some caution is necessary. Not every photograph with blur, sepia, and soft light is Pictorialist. Historical Pictorialism was an artistic movement that sought a particular cultural status for photography, developed its own institutional networks, and insisted on the photographer’s role as an artist. Manipulating the print was one of the means through which these ideas were realised. Demachy is an especially clear example because intervention in the print was part of the making of the work itself.
For that reason, I would not define contemporary Pictorialism simply as “painterly photography”. A more useful description is a photographic practice in which the photographer moves away from pure recording and treats the photograph as material from which an image can be constructed.
At that level, gum bichromate and Photoshop can certainly be discussed within the same historical tradition, but they occupy very different material and technological positions. Demachy worked directly on the physical photographic object, manipulating pigment and the sensitised gum layer by hand. A contemporary photographer working digitally intervenes in a file and controls its appearance before producing the final print. The resulting images may sometimes look remarkably similar, but the nature of the artistic intervention is fundamentally different.
That is why I would not describe Neo-Pictorialism at PTF as a reconstruction of historical Pictorialism. Nor would I argue that the use of digital tools automatically disqualifies it from the term. A more precise description would be this: The PTF exhibition represents an aesthetic and digital form of contemporary Pictorialism, in which continuity with the tradition exists primarily in the way the image is conceived and constructed rather than in the photographic material or process. This distinction allows us to look at contemporary Pictorialism not as a single movement, but as several responses to the same underlying problem.
Some photographers return to historical materials and processes. Others combine them with digital tools. Still others preserve mainly the Pictorialist way of seeing and constructing an image, but transfer it entirely into the digital environment. Perhaps Pictorialism has not so much returned as changed form. One strand has returned to materiality: gum, emulsion, pigment, chemistry, paper, manual intervention, and the physical character of the print. Another has retained the idea of hybridity, combining digital preparation with historical processes. A third has preserved primarily the visual and authorial principles of Pictorialism and moved them into the digital world.
This is why an artist working with gum bichromate and a photographer working entirely in Photoshop may both regard themselves as inheritors of Pictorialism. They are not doing the same thing, however, and their practices should not automatically be treated as equivalent simply because their images may look similar. Perhaps that is what makes the Gdańsk exhibition Neo-Pictorialism more significant than its title initially suggests. It does not settle the question of what contemporary Pictorialism is. Instead, it shows that the question is still very much alive.
At a time when cameras can record reality with extraordinary precision and computers can manipulate images almost without limits, there are still photographers who want to make something more than a record. Demachy did it with a brush, pigment, gum, and water. A contemporary photographer may use a tablet, Photoshop, and a printer. The technology has changed, but the underlying question remains remarkably familiar:
What do we do with a photograph once the camera has finished its part?
Perhaps that is the most enduring legacy of Pictorialism. Not gum, not soft focus, not sepia, but the conviction that between the photograph made by the camera and the work created by the artist, there remains a space in which the author can act.
Notes
Lisa Hostetler, “International Pictorialism,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Demachy, Une Balleteuse, 1900, collection entry and technical discussion.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Demachy, Struggle, ca. 1903, collection entry and technical discussion.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Photography: Processes, Preservation, and Conservation,” discussion of gum bichromate and its use by Pictorialists.
Andy Romanoff, “Even Ansel Adams Had a Blind Spot,” Burchfield Penney Art Center, 2014.
Joe Farace, “Digital Darkroom Days: Swinging with Plug-Ins and Actions,” Shutterbug, 2009.
Royal Photographic Society, Squaring the Circles of Confusion: Neo-Pictorialism in the 21st Century, curated by Zelda Cheatle, RPS Gallery, Bristol, 2022.
Royal Photographic Society, exhibition materials for Squaring the Circles of Confusion, 2022.
Camera Work - Contemporary Pictorialism, Flickr group, founded in 2006.
Discussions of “Modern Pictorialism” and “Are These Pictorialism?”, Camera Work - Contemporary Pictorialism, Flickr.
Lisa Hostetler, “International Pictorialism,” op. cit.
The Neo-Pictorialists, “Ethos,” The Neo-Pictorial School of Photography.
