Pictorialism
The ‘art
for art’s sake’ attitude appeared a
little later in photography than painting or the new etching revival in
printmaking(25).
In 1897
John Kauffmann (1864-1942) returned to his hometown of Adelaide after ten
years in Europe. He had gone to work in the office of English architects
Macmurdo and Horne and returned to Adelaide a convert to the new art photography
movement
in Europe.
He
joined the South Australian Photographic Society and arranged
for his work to be printed as bromide enlargements by Baker’s
Austral Company in Melbourne, and by October had submitted his work
to the Society
of Artists
in Sydney for inclusion in their next exhibition. It was not accepted,
but the Australian Star of 8 October praised Kauffmann’s
prints as ‘some
of the most perfect photographic work ever seen . . . clear and truly artistic’.
Graphic arts were, however, accepted for the first time in the Society
of Artists 1897 exhibition.(26).
Kauffmann’s
bromide enlargements were shown instead at the Baker and Rouse warehouse
in Sydney and at their office in Adelaide. The South Australian Register
of 11 February 1898 described them as ‘alluring landscape, water,
and cloud interpretations of Nature’. Both reviews had stressed
Kauffmann’s
delicate tones, as did later reviews in the APR and the APJ when
commenting on his exhibits in the 1898 annual exhibitions of the South
Australian
and New South
Wales Photographic Societies(27). The
following year Kauffmann won first prize in the landscape class of the
Photographic Society of New South
Wales Intercolonial
Exhibition, and by 1901 he was invited to judge his own society’s
annual exhibition, along with H. P. Gill (1855-1916) the Director
of the School of Design, Painting and Technical Arts.
The
1901 exhibition of the South Australian Photographic Society
was considered ‘one
of the finest’ by the reviewer in the South Australian Register
of 19 October as, some of the works could be mistaken for works of
art’.
The
implied reason was the absence of ‘all the sharp
and hard lines usually associated with photography’. The response
to Kauffmann’s work confirms
that it was considerably removed from the straight naturalism of
earlier work like Baker’s and Farquhar’s and probably
Impressionistic, but not as extreme, or abstracted as the 9 by 5
Exhibition of Impressionist
painters
in 1889.
Kauffmann
was not alone in presenting photographs that were more allied
to the graphic arts and painting than the views of earlier
photographers.
FA.
Joyner
and Fred Radford, both of Adelaide, were also exhibiting works
by 1898-1899
which, while not dependent on Kauffmann’s style, showed their
awareness of the trends in Pictorial photography in Europe. Debates
over the merit of
the kind of tonal impressionism as seen in the 9 by 5 show were
also being conducted
in Adelaide, and provided a sympathetic climate for the reception
of an Impressionistic aesthetic in photography(28).
Pictorial
photography began as a specific movement in England around 1890
when George Davison (1854-1930) was awarded a silver medal
by the Royal Photographic Society for his soft-focus Impressionistic
photograph The onion field. It was
dependent on French Impressionist painters, although somewhat
sentimental by comparison to such painters’ concerns with
rigorous study of specific moments of time, space and atmosphere(29).
Davison’s
work was not as impressive as that of P. H. Emerson who had
used selective focus in his photographs, not with the aim of
making
them look like Impressionism, but from a belief that overall
sharp focus of the camera was not
true to natural vision. Emerson produced a dazzling body of
work through the publication of his photographically illustrated
book, Life and Landscape on the
Norfolk Broads of 1886. In his book Naturalistic Photography
of 1889, Emerson articulated a theory that photography
was an independent art form with its own
aesthetic basis in truth to the subject, and ‘natural’ impressionistic
vision'. By 1890 he had recanted in his tract Death of
Naturalistic Photography saying photography could never
be controlled enough to be an art(30). Few
of Emerson’s
photographic publications reached Australia although later
Pictorialists borrowed his imagery. The complexity of his theories
discouraged
comment and debate
in Australia, although the photographic magazines advertised
his texts and made
some references to them(31).
In
1892, George Davison was at the centre of a controversy between
the administrators of the Royal Photographic Society
and the
more art-minded of its members,
which led to the formation of a breakaway group who called
themselves The Linked Ring
Brotherhood, and set up the London Photographic Salon in
1893. Membership of The Links was by invitation only. Their aim
was
to demonstrate,
by
example, the
pictorial application of photography as a means of expression
indistinguishable from the other arts. In this attitude The
Links also reflected
the revival of printmaking as an independent and equal art
form, which
had encouraged
the new
etcher circles in Australia and the opening up of the Society
of Artists 1897 exhibition to the graphic arts.
They
saw The Royal Photographic Society as overly concerned with ‘minutiae
of the science of optics’. The Links concentrated
attention on the final print not the ‘negative sketch’.
The latter had to show ‘evidence
of personal artistic feeling and execution(32).
A
similar disparagement of the minutiae of the negative
sketch appeared in the December 1890 issue of the Australian
Critic.
In an article
on ‘The Hand
Camera in Photography’, the author recommended
amateurs re-examine their seemingly hopeless negatives
for the presence
of broad effects 'which showed
life and action rather than the rest and almost death’ of
the perfect sharp picture(33).
Australian
photographers were kept up to date on the debates over
photographic aesthetics in Europe by the photographic
magazines including the Photograms of the Year,
which reviewed the
annual London exhibitions at the Royal
and the London Salon in the 1890s. The Australian edition
of the Photographic Review of Reviews of November
1894 included an extract from a speech by founder
member H. P. Robinson to the London Photographic Salon,
in which he said that ‘exclusive
devotion to science is a chief cause of want of success
in picture-making(34).
Henry
Robinson (1830-1901) was a painter by training
and an enthusiastic convert to photography in the
I85Os known for his skilful and ambitious narrative
pictures made by combining many negatives. He was
also an influential theorist and campaigner for photography
as an art, having published various books, including
Pictorial Effect in Photography in 1869 and Picture-Making
by Photography in
1884, as guides to how to make photographs look like
art by the choice of storytelling subjects and control
of the final image by printing techniques. Robinson’s
dogmatic rules of composition were far removed from
Emerson’s vision
of a separate naturalistic photographic aesthetic(35).
The
split between bohemian and bourgeoisie, poetry
and prose, art and science was not limited to followers
of
aestheticism
or Pictorial
photography.
Profound changes were occurring in the division
of labour into specific vocations,
with separate training programmes and philosophies.
The Australian Association for
the Advancement of Science was formed in 1888,
and marks the close of the
era of Natural Philosophy in which study of the
natural world as a microcosm led
to universal theories. The gentleman-amateur scientist
of earlier years was increasingly replaced by the
new and specialised
professional anthropologist,
geologist or
scientist. The new specialist ‘art’ photographers
distinguished themselves both from the ordinary
amateur or the crass professional concerned
only with
money(36).
In
response to local and overseas support for impressionism,
Australian photographers who had had their eyes
opened to the new ‘beauty’ also opened
up their lenses and Pictorialism spread quickly,
in the way previously reserved
for technological advances.
With
Kauffmann’s
elevation to judge of the 1901 South Australian
Photographic Society’s annual exhibition
it can be assumed that the new art photographers
had moved from the peripheries of the amateur
societies to the centre, as The Links had done
in England. This trend was viewed with some
concern by A. Hill
Griffiths, Australian correspondent to the Photograms
of the Year, who wrote that, ‘I
deem it an unpardonable error to depict Australian
scenes
with uncharacteristic English mists(37).
The
South Australian Photographic Society was
particularly active in the early advances of
Pictorialism. By
1898 F.A. Joyner (1863-1945), an Adelaide-born
solicitor(38) with
many cultural and scientific interests, had
his figure subject Dawn accepted
at the Philadelphia Salon. By the turn of
the century he was
using soft-focus and misty atmosphere in
his landscapes. Later in 1905 he made extended
narratives illustrating rhymes such as Jack
and Jill. Kauffmann avoided such genre narratives
so that although his work may have stimulated
the South Australian
Society into favouring Pictorialism, Joyner
was drawing on earlier Pre-Raphaelite paintings
and Pictorialism as favoured by H. P. Robinson
rather than Kauffmann
for his inspiration. Joyner and many of the
amateurs were following on genre traditions
established in the 1880s, in particular by
Caire and others, with
their storytelling photographs(39).
Fred
T. Radford (w. c.1898-1920) was possibly
inspired by Kauffmann but adopted a more
extreme soft-focus which can be seen in
his An impressionist
photo illustrated in The Photograms
of the Year of 1899. In the same year
Radford contributed an article, ‘Impressionist
Photography’ to
the APR. in which he argued for
the greater truth of soft-focus in representing
nature,
than ‘the present methods of small
stops and needle sharpness; something must
be left to the imagination as well as a
general softening of all
lines’. He allied with ‘workers
who aim at something higher than “you
press the button, we do the rest”(40).
Radford’s
support for Impressionism in photography
paralleled the public debate in Adelaide
over the controversial purchase of Sydney
Long’s painting The valley for the Art Gallery
of South Australia. This work was actually
less
extreme formally than some of the 9 by
5 works of 1889 but the South Australian
Register defended the purchase in an
editorial on 28 November 1898. As well
as educating the public to the truth
of
the new vision, the Impressionist style
could:
impart
the hint that much pleasure can be derived from the habit of
retaining
in the
mind the
impression conveyed
when
the beauties
of
a scene first
burst upon the gaze, and before the ‘poetry
of the indefinite’ has been
dispelled by the prose of a matter-of-fact
scrutiny of detail.
By
1891 Radford had established himself as a professional
in Adelaide, presumably
one
of the
earliest Pictorial
photographers to bring
the new style to commercial
work. Around 1903 he travelled to
England and America where he worked for some
years, returning
to Adelaide
around
1909 to work
from the
Fruhling studio. By this time he
was using the range of printing processes
which
gave the
Pictorialists
the means to idealise and romanticise
their images by suppression of detail
and
control of tone. Radford worked in
carbon and platinum and had a number
of his
gum-bichromate
portraits
included in
The
Royal
Photographic
Society’s annual
exhibitions. No examples of his work
have been located. As Kauffmann never
provided written accounts of his
philosophy, Radford’s energetic
promotion of photo-impressionism
is the earliest
direct exposition of Australian Pictorialists’ aims
and aspirations(41).
The
South Australian Photographic Society’s
1901 exhibition had been intercolonial.
In the following two years they
also held international exhibitions.
A
few minor English Pictorialists,
David Blount and Harold Hill, comprised
the ‘international’ content
and Blount’s gum-bichromate
portrait The daughter of Eve was
awarded the gold medal(42). The
Society’s
1903 exhibition included a few
more entries from overseas, a print
by
H. P. Robinson and one by A. Horsley-Hinton
(1863-1908).
The latter’s landscapes remained
popular with Australians for several
decades.
In
December 1903 the New South Wales Photographic Society
took
over the
lead in Pictorialism
from the South Australians,
with
their own
large
international salon. A number
of gum-bichromates by American photo-secessionist
Edward
Steichen were shown in the noncompetitive
section. Over fifty years later
Steichen would
send The Family of Man exhibition
to Australia. It was another
international exhibition,
but committed to a
different aesthetic;
the documentary
photograph.
Sydney
Long reviewed the 500 or so exhibits in the
New South
Wales
Photographic
Society’s 1903 show,
mentioning Kauffmann’s
strong point as ‘the
rendering of sil-very light
on masses of water'(43).
Long
also liked Steichen’s
portrait work which he felt
was ‘too good
to become popular with the
public as it was not excessively
retouched'. The rest of Steichen’s
work struck him as experiments
in imitating some other mediums,
finding his Judgment
of Paris ‘a
very far fetched piece of
symbolism’.
Perhaps Long was experimenting
with photography at this
time, as were other artists,
such
as Norman Lindsay (1879-1969)
and his brother Lionel (1874-1961).
The latter was most active
around 1911 when he made
bromoils and autochromes(44).
Norman
Lindsay’s self portrait
photograph of c.1903 is
typical of the style of
portraiture
in the arts of the day
with emphasis on lighting
to create
mood
and characterisation. Steichen’s
work in the 1903 exhibition
would have been similar,
although more exaggerated
being in the painterly
gum-process. Extreme soft-focus
works,
from members of the main
eastern societies, were
present at
the 1903 exhibition prompting
the APR. editor
to comment:
We
notice many of our old friends from
the fuzzy-wuzzy
school,
baffling the
vision and
confusing the
brain of onlookers(45).