Photography
as Art, Introduction
©Werner Hammerstingl,
1998,2001
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Many professional
photographers saw in the idea of ''art photography'' the justification of their
work: their ambition was to achieve the effects of painting and drawing by manipulating
their photographs in the course of developing and printing.
In a paper read
before the Camera Club in London in March 1886, Peter Henry Emerson criticised
the work of Robinson and his followers for subordinating photography to the
set formulas of academic painting. Emerson saw photography as fulfilling its
natural task when it drew equally on art and science by providing a direct transcription
of visual sensations.
He insisted on the superiority of photography, in both accuracy and illusionism,
to all the engraved media of reproduction. To illustrate his true-to nature
theories, he published a book of forty platinotype prints: Life and Landscape
on the Norfolk Broads (1886). It admirably captures the quiet beauty of
this low-lying area of East Anglia, with its shallow meres. their low banks
massed with luxuriant reeds and water plants. Developing his ideas of natural,
straightforward picture-taking as opposed to the contrived picture-making of
photographers like Robinson and Rejlander, Emerson set forth his credo in his
book Naturalistic Photography (1889). He called for honest photographs
taken on the spot and developed the same day He objected to retouching, which
he pointedly described as
"the process
by which a good, bad or indifferent photograph is converted into a bad drawing
or painting... The technique of photography is perfect; no such botchy aids
are necessary".
Then, in 1891, Emerson
had a revulsion against the views he had previously held and publicly renounced
them in a booklet entitled The Death of Naturalistic Photography. With a certain
bitterness he wrote:
''The
limitations of photography are so great that, though the results rnay and sometimes
do give a certain aesthetic pleasure, the medium must always rank the lowest
of all arts..., for the individuality of the artist is cramped... In short,
I throw my lot in with those who say that photography is a very limited art.
I regret deeply that I have to come to this conclusion".
But "talent is more
important than good ideas" (John Szarkowski) and Emerson remains an outstanding
figure in the "naturalistic school" of nineteenth-century photography. BLOCKQUOTE>"the establishment of a distinct
pictorial movement through the severance of... photography from the purely scientific
and technical".
And so after the emphasis on honest photography came the emphasis on style and
''artistic character'' —in other words, on effects. But disregarding the exigencies
of the eye and neglecting the native, inherent possibilities of their medium,
the art photographers merely lapsed again into the effects already produced by
painters, while the latter were now engaged in a more searching exploration of
reality and unending experiment with the expressive powers of their art.
Alfred Stieglitz is one of the most influential figures in the history of photography,
the first to demonstrate that it ranks as a fine art in its own right, one not
to be opposed to or confused with the other arts, because it has its own specific
and authentic character. His influence made itself felt not only through his pictures
but also through his tireless activity as a publisher, gallery owner, and organiser
of exhibitions.
By about 1890 the status of the photographer was threatened by the commercial
and industrial expansion of photography. Stieglitz had the same misgivings as
Emerson, but keeping steadfastly to his early aspirations he surmounted the crisis
of art photography, surmounted it triumphantly, carrying with him some of the
men and women who were to give a new dimension to photography. As it happened,
it was Emerson who awarded a prize to Stieglitz for one of the latter's first
photographs," A Good Joke" in a contest organised by The Amateur Photographer
in London in 1887.
Born in Hoboken in 1864, Stieglitz went to Berlin in 1882 to study engineering.
There he discovered photography and studied the technique under Dr H. W. Vogel,
a photo-chemist who had made some important improvements in the use of emulsions.
Abandoning engineering, Stieglitz travelled and photographed in Europe, following
with keenest interest the debates then taking place in camera circles.
When he returned to New York in 1890, he joined the Society for Amateur Photographers
and became editor of its journal, The American Amateur Photographer. His practical
competence added to his critical and theoretical intelligence soon established
him as an authority. By his writings and lectures he opened the United States
to the aesthetic debates attending the development of photography and, by the
severity of his judgments, made his colleagues more critical.
Stieglitz called for straight photography without artifice. With his hand-held
detective camera he made in the 1890s a series of unretouched pictures of New
York which show him expert enough to foresee and obtain the effects he wanted,
without after-manipulation. His creative powers and imagination, indeed his genius,
were quickly recognised both in the United States and Europe.
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In 1896 the Society for Amateur Photographers and the New York Camera Club merged
to form the Camera Club. Stieglitz became its vice president and editor of Carnera
Notes. Then, in 1902, he broke away and founded the Photo Secession whose aim
was:
"To advance
photography as applied to pictorial expression; to draw together those Americans
practicing or otherwise interested in art; to hold from time to time, at varying
places, exhibitions not necessarily limited to the productions of the Photo-Secession
or to American work"
The name re-echoed
that of the modernist movements in German and Austrian art circles. Stieglitz
was its moving spirit and launched its quarterly journal, Camera Work, "the mouthpiece
of the Photo-Secession,'' which he edited and published with open-minded acceptance
of good work, from wherever it came and whatever the procedures used.
From 1903 to 1917 he published fifty numbers of Camera Work, the most prestigious
survey of photography of that period. The editor's clairvoyance is shown by the
variety and importance of the artists represented and the interest and quality
of the articles. Stieglitz extended the scope of his activities, and his influence,
by founding in 1905 The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue,
New York better known as the 291 Gallery. It became the American rallying point
for all those interested in or practising contemporary art, for Stieglitz was
bold and intelligent enough to make no distinction between the different art forms
and media, always insisting on their close interaction. So that in addition to
the photographers represented in Camera Work he exhibited in his gallery such
artists as Rodin, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, Brancusi, Braque and Picabia; and
Americans like Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin and Marsden Hartley.
Equally demanding as a photographer and a promoter, Stieglitz sought out quality
and novelty and promise where he could find them. In 1913 he declared that "photographers
will learn to stop blushing if their photographs are considered simply as photographs",
thus testifying to his abiding conviction that when the photographer is strong
enough to develop his vision and recognise the specificity of his medium he becomes
a creative artist. Thus, while he published and exhibited art photographs, he
stands out as one of the makers of photographic art.
It was thanks to Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession that photography first achieved
official recognition as a fine art on an equal footing with the other arts. In
1910 the Photo-Secession was asked to organise an international exhibition of
art photographs at the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. With the help
of his friends Paul Haviland, Clarence H. White and the painter Max Weber, Stieglitz
made a selection of some six hundred photographs. This marked the culmination
of his battle for the public acceptance of photography as an art. After the show,
the Albright Art Gallery purchased fifty of the prints exhibited: this constituted
the first public collection of photographs in the United States.
In 1913, at the 291 Gallery, he presented a showing of his own photographs, for
the first time since 1899. It was a significant gesture. He had there exhibited
contemporary painting and sculpture, now both on the threshold of abstraction;
and in an outspoken article he had urged the American public to visit the Armory
Show in New York in 1913, the first big exhibition of contemporary art to be seen
in the United States; and so he felt bound to show, in his own work, what photography
could do and be at a time when painting had moved away from descriptive realism.
Stieglitz's one-man show of 1913 was all the more necessary because the public
misunderstood, or was unprepared for, the advanced exhibitions of painting he
mounted at his gallery, interpreting them as a recognition of the limits of photography.
In all his activities
Stieglitz was ably seconded by his friend and collaborator Edward Steichen,
a man of ideas as well as a creative photographer. Born in Luxembourg in 1879
and brought up in Milwaukee, Stephen studied painting and lithography to begin
with, then turned to photography. The photographs he sent in to the Chicago
Photographic Salon in 1900 caught the attention of two jury members, Alfred
Stieglitz and Clarence H. White. His style was so personal, his use of light
so steeped in poetry and mystery, that he soon made a name for himself. Working
in London, then in Paris, in the early 1900s, Steichen gained an international
reputation: by 1910 he was recognised as one of the foremost art photographers.
With his camera he achieved the same effects as painting and drawing. He assumed
in practice an artist's right to take any liberty with reality and the processes
of his medium in order to obtain effective results. His elaborate compositions
are founded on an intricate play of tonal values powerfully supporting the emotional
expression and symbolic implications. Camera Work regularly reproduced his pictures,
and his portraits of Rodin, Bernard Shaw and Anatole France are both historic
and artistic documents.