Page 64 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 64/146
Camille Silvy in France, around the middle of the 19th century. Around this time also, Oscar Gustav Rejlander makes his Two Ways of Life (1857) - a multiple-negative print that attracted wide attention for its serious artistic intent (it illustrates a moral tale of the choice of a good or an evil life. Henry Peach Robinson produces his 5-negative combination photograph (Fading Away 1858), and the South Kensington museum held the first exhibition of photography (1858) - the commonplace pho- tograph was being at last, after twenty years, accepted or treated as an art form! “Robinson used the (multi-negative) technique for much of his career and relied on it as a tool for promoting his be- lief that , in the hands of artists who understood the rules of composition and lighting, photography could aspire to - and achieve - the status of pictorial art.” (Juliet Hacking (ed) Photography The Whole Story 2012). To my mind Peach Robinson proved his point in his multi-negative masterpiece Bringing Home the May (1862). And by 1867, Peach Robinson had produced his manifesto arguing his thesis - The Pictorial Effect in Photography (1867). This was where it started. And of course, Frank Eugene and his contemporaries Anne Brigman, Gertrude Kasebier and others went much fur- ther in their interpretation of the Pictorialist idea - not just retouching their photographs, but actu- ally painting onto or into them (look at the background to both images above, the brushwork is un- disguised).
https://archive.artic.edu/stieglitz/frank-eugene/
Here Frank Eugene, one of the founding members of the Photo-Secession, virtually paints – or at least stylises – his symbolist landscape as a backdrop to his contemplative nude (centre-above). “Eugene etched his negatives to produce a print that was part photograph, part etching. In this pho- tograph Eugene has added highlights to the woman’s body, and the background has been heavily reworked.” (National Media Museum). Eugene was a pictorialist - who believed that photographers had as much right as painters to manipulate their images. During this period of the early 20th cen- tury, Steiglitz, Eugene, Robert Demachy, Gertrude Kasebier, Clarence White and others of Steiglitz’ Photo Secessionists group, were exploring this fertile territory of the symbiosis of photography and Modernist painting, and from this avant garde perspective were breaking new grounds in the por- trayal of the female body. See also Emile Bayard Le Nu Esthetique (1904) and Walter Sickert: The Naked and the Nude 1910. Scholars have suggested that photography itself was the main contribut- ory factor in altering the public attitude towards the unclothed body - climbing out of the Victorian prudery and repressive sensibility. (see Marcus Bunyan 2013)
Clarence White: Pictorialist Nudes 1909.
Edward Steichen captures the young-looking Clarence White in 1908 (he was about 36), when he was top of his game, and Alfred Steiglitz had just devoted an entire issue of the Pictorialist journal Camera Works to him. White was a founder-member of the Photo-Secession group, joining Alfred Steiglitz, F. Holland Day, Gertrude Kasebier, Frank Eugene and many other believers that photo- graphers had as much right as painters to manipulate their images in camera as well as in the post-camera processes. The beautiful ‘impressionist’ images that White produced around this time are testament to the pictorialist vision which had