PICTORIAL PHOTOGRAPHY By pictorial photography we mean photography applied to the production of pictures in the accepted artistic tradition, but whether such pictures are to be admitted as art is a matter upon which the critics are still at variance. The subjects with which photography can deal most successfully are those in which realistic representation is permissible and not such as demand an imaginative treatment.
For that reason photography of the nude, which has always been a tempting subject, fails for the most part, not because it presents any greater technical difficulties but because the realism inseparable from photography makes it almost im possible to combine it with an idealistic conception, whilst it is equally difficult to use it convincingly in subjects drawn from ordinary life. To present the nude by photography simply as a study of the beauty of the human form involves firstly the finding of a model of perfect proportions and secondly extreme delicacy of artistic treatment to prevent degeneration into the recording of mere nakedness. In modern times this class of work is mostly done in the studios of the professional photographers who have greater facilities than the amateurs, but however excellent their work may be technically, it is usually quite meaningless from the artistic point of view. The finest use of the nude is to be found in the work of the Americans, especially those living in California where conditions are exceptionally favourable, and particularly in that of Annie Brigman, Arthur Kales and Walter Collinge.
In other directions photography has more scope. Landscape, portraiture, domestic genre and still life all offer ample opportunities to the camera worker with artistic education and a trained eye. Still life, in particular, offers endless possibilities for imaginative treatment by photography and some very beauti ful work of the kind has been done in the past by Baron de Meyer, J. M. Whitehead and E. Seymour. It is a branch of photography which the Japanese of the American Pacific coast have developed upon lines of their own in recent times, grafting the American love of startling eccentricities upon their own inborn sense of design.
In their aptitude for seeing a pattern or decorative effect in chance combinations of the most commonplace kind they are unequalled. The exploitation of effects of pattern of an eccentric or sensa tional nature, if it did not actually originate in America, certainly reached its greatest development there some twenty years ago as a method of self advertisement. Such it still remains.
The sounder development of modern pictorial photography shows itself in a feeling for broader and simpler effects, in a stronger sense of pattern and in more attention to the form than to the content of the picture, in other words the picture is no longer expected to tell a story. As a graphic art, photography has certain disabilities, for it cannot suppress facts and cannot omit unwanted details at will. It can modify the presentation of the facts but any suppression or alteration has to be done by sub sequent manipulations, usually involving handwork upon the nega tive or print, the legitimacy of which has been questioned.
The story of pictorial photography is largely bound up with the progressive improvements in the materials with which the photographer had to work. Fox Talbot's Calotype pro vided the first method of making pictures by the agency of light and so added photography to the graphic arts. In the year 1833 he was at Lake Como endeavouring to make sketches with the aid of the Camera Lucida but, lacking the necessary skill of hand, sought to devise a means of recording automatically the view as seen on the paper. After five or six years of experiment he was able to demonstrate his discovery of the process which is the basis of modern photography and two years later patented an improve ment of this under the name of Calotype. He himself was a scientist rather than artist and it cannot be said that any of his surviving photographs show an artistic impulse.