LESSON 80
History II: 1900 to 1950
Art debates, small cameras, and the documentary.
IN THIS LESSON
- Pictorialism and the fight for art
- Straight photography and Group f/64
- Smaller cameras, colour film
- Documentary and reportage
- In practice: seeing the change
Pictorialism and the fight for art
Around 1900 the big question was whether photography could be art. Pictorialism, which thrived from about 1885 to 1915, answered by making photographs look made rather than recorded: soft focus, prints in browns or blues, visible brushwork. In New York, Alfred Stieglitz formed the Photo-Secession on 17 February 1902, a group that promoted photography as fine art and pictorialism in particular. It was the American counterpart of the Linked Ring in Britain. The long debate ended with major museums acquiring photographs. Pictorialism declined after 1920, as sharper, modernist pictures came into favour.
Straight photography and Group f/64
The opposing idea, straight or pure photography, aimed at sharp focus and full detail, using qualities that set photography apart from painting. The term was used by the critic Sadakichi Hartmann in Camera Work as early as 1904, and Stieglitz himself later promoted it; Paul Strand, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams became associated with it. Straight photographers still used darkroom techniques; the term came to mean an aesthetic of rich tones, sharp focus and strong underlying geometry. Group f/64, whose name is a very small aperture setting, opened its first exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco on 15 November 1932.
Smaller cameras, colour film
Mass-market photography arrived with the Kodak Brownie in 1901. The Leica, first sold in 1925, was the first commercially successful camera to use 35 mm film, and its small size and quality lenses helped photographers work quickly in crowds. Colour moved forward too. The Lumière brothers introduced the Autochrome plate in 1907, the first widely used colour process, though exposures were slow. Kodachrome, available for 16 mm home movies in 1935 and 35 mm slides in 1936, recorded colour in three layers and began a new era. Fashion photography also took shape: Edward Steichen's Poiret gowns appeared in April 1911.
Documentary and reportage
The 1930s Depression brought a new wave of documentary work. The Farm Security Administration, with Roy Stryker in charge of its photography, funded Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, John Vachon, Marion Post Wolcott and others. The source credits that generation with fixing the documentary code of accuracy combined with passionate advocacy. In 1932 Brassaï's Paris de nuit made night photography a serious art. In 1947 Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger, Maria Eisner and William and Rita Vandivert founded Magnum Photos in Paris, a cooperative owned by its members, who keep the copyright in their work.
In practice: seeing the change
This section is working practice. Put a pictorialist print and a Group f/64 print side by side and list the differences: focus, tone, subject, surface. Then look at a 1930s documentary picture and ask who it was made for and what it asked viewers to do. The arguments of this period, about manipulation, truth and art, are the same ones photographers still have about editing and AI today. Notice too how a technical change, such as the small Leica or faster film, opened new subjects: crowds, movement, people who did not know they were being photographed. Ask of any picture what the equipment of its day made possible, and what it still ruled out.
Try it today
- 01Find one pictorialist photograph and one by a member of Group f/64.
- 02List five visual differences between them.
- 03Look at three Farm Security Administration photographs and write who each was made for.
- 04Find a 1930s Leica street picture and note what the small camera made possible.
- 05Write one paragraph on whether pictorialism's arguments still apply to editing now.