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The roots of photographic pictorialism - Checklist |
Contextual notes:
Early photographers had little stylistic choice but to reference the artistic milieu with which they were aware. The inventors of photography such as Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Mandé Daguerre and Fox Talbot were cultured people who were immersed in both the arts and sciences of their time. Here four examples clearly show how emerging photography was influenced by engravings and paintings.
- One of the earliest heliographs by Nicéphore Niépce, done on a pewter plate in about 1820, was copy of a print of Cardinal d'Amboise. The early photographers such as Fox Talbot, John Dillwyn Llewelyn and many others copied artworks as a means of testing the fidelity of their photographs and demonstrating their utility.
- In the still life by Louis Jules Duboscq from about 1850 the layout of objects is far from random and it closely follows spacing rules used to create a harmonious painting.
- Early portraits were often uninteresting but there are some photographers who seem a hundred years before their time and the partnership of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson in the 1840s is one of these. In this 1844 portrait of James Nasmyth, inventor of the steam hammer, the pose and gaze resemble a painting or engraving with his eyes avoiding the viewer and seemingly deep in thought.
- With the 1877 photograph "When the Day‘s Work Is Done" Henry Peach Robinson has constructed a set of props where costumed models play roles in a living tableau. Images that showed hard work with nostalgic overtones for a rural past were popular in Victorian Britain. Using people in period costumes to imitate paintings was used by other photographers including Oscar Gustave Rejlander, Guido Rey, Richard Polak, Lejaren a Hiller and more recently with Cindy Sherman and Sandy Skoglund.
The links between photographic subjects and painting are unmistakable and understanding these roots helps in appreciating the rise of Pictorialism that was so important in photography until the 1920s. |
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