At first they were content with swathing their models in flow ing draperies, or creating genre studies with costumed figures and painted backgrounds, or combining parts of a variety of negatives into one composite print. But wet plates and improved lenses provided a sharp, detailed image that gave their photographs a most unpainterly appearance. To counteract this, soft focus lenses were constructed and retouching led the way to direct pencil work on the negative. Finally new printing processes were devised that enabled the photographer to control his results so completely that he could produce an imitation etching, mezzotint, drawing, or woodblock, at will. This kind of "photo-painting" achieves its ultimate absurdity in pictures where all traces of the original image have been so thoroughly obliterated that it is impossible to guess their photographic origin.
The Photo-Secession.—The first photographer to head a def inite movement away from this kind of practice was Alfred Stieg litz. In New York in the early 1900s, as leader of a group called the Photo-Secession, and as editor of two photographic maga zines, Camera Notes and Camera Work, Stieglitz campaigned for a return to "pure" photography—that is, photography unmixed with any other graphic medium. His work and the publications he edited had a profound effect on photography, and the 50 issues of Camera Work (published from 5903-17) form a unique and beautiful record of an important chapter in the development of photographic art.
The members of the Photo-Secession considered soft-focus lenses and the various flexible printing processes valid means of control for the photographer, but they eschewed all manual inter ference with the camera's image as unphotographic. Although many of them continued to follow the painter's tradition as far as their results were concerned, they kept to photographic means in achieving those results and so made the first important step toward a recognition of the proper limitations of the medium.
Pictorialist vs. Purist.—In the years that followed, the re action against the photo-painting technique was carried to ex tremes. Photographers who were primarily interested in the technical side of the medium carried "purism" to such lengths as to maintain that no control of any sort should be exercised by the photographer, and that even the "spotting" of dust specks and scratches on negative or print was a violation of the medium. From this reaction came the modern use of the terms pictorialist and purist. If a photographer belonged to the first group, he was supposed to work up his negative by hand and always strive to make his resulting print look like a drawing, etching, etc., while
a member of the purist group was supposed to make sharp prints on glossy paper using no control except in choosing his subject matter and camera angle. Actually, no two such clear-cut groups ever existed. Many so-called pictorialists used purely photo graphic methods, and many so-called purists controlled (but not by manual operations) all of their procedures.
But there were heated debates over purist vs. pictorialist meth ods and a great deal of misunderstanding was fostered, first by the failure of both sides to define clearly the terms they em ployed, and second, by a tendency on the part of many photog raphers to mistake means fOr ends and consider the method of production more important than the product itself.
Aesthetic Basis of Photographic Art.—Anyone who has mastered a few simple instructions can make printable negatives with a pocket kodak. Because it is impossible for the untrained beginner to achieve such acceptable results in any other medium, photography has sometimes been called "the easy art." But to bridge the gulf between the taking of such casual snapshots and the production of photographs that can be classed as art is certainly no easy task. To the mastering of his tools and the perfecting of his technique, the photographer must devote just as much time and effort as does the musician or the painter. Since the nature of the photographic process determines the artist's approach, we must have some knowledge of the inherent char acteristics of the medium in order to understand what constitutes the aesthetic basis of photographic art.
Photography must always deal with things—it cannot record abstract ideas—but far from being restricted to copying nature, as many suppose, the photographer has ample facilities for pre senting his subject in any manner he chooses.
First, an infinite number of compositions can be achieved with a single stationary subject by varying the position of the camera, the camera angle, or the focal length of the lens. Second, any or all values can be altered by change of light on the subject, or the use of a colour filter. Third, the registering of relative values in the negative can be controlled by length of exposure, kind of emulsion used, and method of developing. And finally, the rela tive values in the negative can be further modified by allowing more or less light to affect certain parts of the image in printing.