Page 59 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 59/146
Adolf de Meyer: Society Portraits c1912.
This period (the ‘Belle Epoque’), and the artists who thrived as visual documenters of it, is fascin- ating. It is no coincidence that during this time, photographers began to compete stylistically with the portrait artists - especially those mannerists like Boldini, Blanche and Singer Sargent - by ex- ploring the potential of the art-influenced pictorialist photographic style. De Meyer's work during this period reflects the influence of 20th century pictorialists like Robert Demachy, Alfred Steiglitz, Gertrude Kasebier, and Frank Eugene. That images of high society were becoming a mediated commodity is of course due to photography and the popular ‘graphic’ presss, and to the then dom- inant use of the half-tone letterpress printing process (invented in 1882) which allowed even news- papers to reproduce high-quality photographic images on cheap newsprint paper (The Daily Mirror began using the halftone process to great effect in 1904). The synergies of period and the person- alities that came to characterise it, and the new media of illustrated papers and magazines, and post-cards launched the phenomenon of celebrity that punctuates twentieth century media.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolph_de_Meyer
In many ways, these society portraits were themselves rapidly to become ethnographical memor- abilia - a photographic record of a particular class - an aristocratic, often ex-patriot, upper class, either threatened, or soon to be threatened by radical social change - by War, by Revolution, by Democracy, by Socialism. This new class of social celebrities was also threatened at this time by a new class that would gradually supplant them - the celebrities of the stage, the music-hall, and most of all the new ‘stars’ of the Movies.
While the photographic promotion of celebrity had first been monetised by entrepreneurs like John Jabez Mayall (Royal Album of Cartes); Nadar; Napoleon Sarony, and Emile Reutlinger; and in paint- ings by John Singer Sargent; Giovanni Boldini, and latterly by Charles Dana Gibson (The Gibson Girl of this period). Now with the availability of half-tone photo-reproduction, a new audience at- tracted to the Cinema, and the Stage, the public fascination (or obsession in the UK) with ‘class’; a popular fashion industry, and an abundance of redundant aristocracy meant that the new purvey- ors of celebrity were photographers and film-makers...