I went to TruthBeauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845–1945 at the Phillips Collection some days ago and I discovered that pictorialism isn’t my favorite thing in the world. It was one of my first times seeing Stieglitz’s and Coburn’s photography, and while I was blown away by photographs like Stieglitz’s portraits of Gertrude Kasebier and his photograph Winter – Fifth Avenue, I had a difficult time appreciating photos like Watzek’s Poplar’s and Clouds. It was only when I was able to sit down with a book about Stieglitz and take the time to crunch through Allan Sekula’s “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning” (1975) was I able to better understand and appreciate the significance of the Pictorialism movement.

Alfred Stieglitz, Gertrude Kasebier, 1903

Stieglitz, Winter - Fifth Avenue, 1892

I would have been able to appreciate Pictorialist photographs had I kept in the mind the historical context. These photographs were taken when most of the art world at the turn of the century didn’t consider photography to have artistic potential. Because it rendered an image identical to reality, art critics argued that it could never free itself from its “mechanical insistence on truth”. The photographer could never alter the scene and was entirely dependent on reality. An additional obstacle in photography’s difficulty being considered art was its inherent ability to be mass produced. Ever since the invention of the ruled cross-line halftone screen in the late 1880s, poor reproductions of photographs could be found everywhere. Somehow, photography had to elevate itself from the amateur snapshot (ever since the Kodak Brownie camera became popular) and from the “degraded”, informative photographs in newspapers.

Cue Alfred Stieglitz, one of the most famous photographs of the early 20th century. No photographer did as much to define photography as fine art as Stieglitz. In addition to producing photographs and curating shows, he published Camera Work, a magazine devoted to sharing uncompromisingly beautiful reproductions of photographs and accompanying text. Allan Sekula writes the following: “Through Camera Work Stieglitz established a genre where there had been none: the magazine outlined the terms under which photography could be considered art, and stands as an implicit text, as scripture, behind every photograph that aspires to the status of high art. Camera Work treated the photograph as a central object of the discourse…” Because he made each reproduction by hand, the photographic reproduction itself had intrinsic value based on its physical craftsmanship. In essence, Camera Work rejected photography’s immediate and reproducible nature – the very elements that differentiate photography from other art mediums.

Steichen, Judgment of Paris - A Landscape Arrangement. This photo wouldn't get a good grade in Photo 101.

I saw contradictions like these everywhere in the Pictorialism exhibition. It as if we had walked in on a woman putting on her makeup; photography didn’t want to be seen raw but felt it needed the assistance of a painter’s hand. The photographs on display exhibited a strange mix of painting and photography and frequently were printed in extremely complex and innovative ways. Given the particular moment in history, though, when photography was fighting for its acceptance as an art form, photographers felt like they needed to apologize for their work. Fortunately, this movement rapidly declined around 1914 with the advent of modernism. The exhibition at the Phillips Collection shows some of the earliest pre-modern photographs that were considered art.