Photography at the Turn of the Century: from Pictorialism to Eugène Atget

Photography at the turn of the century
The simplification of the technique was the crucial factor of the radical change that occurred in the practice of photography at the turn of the century.
The development, from 1871 onwards, of dry collodion plates, and then the apparition of silver gelatino-bromure plates for the negatives, and of the aristotype for the prints, which one could then buy ready for use, mark the first stages of this sea-change.

Around 1888, there appeared on the market small cameras (the most famous of which was the Kodak) that were no bigger than the hand, with a film roll, followed by autochromous plate, also sold ready for use. Photography was from then on accessible to a million amateurs who no longer needed, as was the case before, to devote much time and energy to this "hobby" of which it was no longer necessary to know the technical basis.
The soft films on gelatine of portable cameras are even more sensitive to light than negative plates and make it possible to take authentic snapshots outdoors in 1/40 of a second. These new possibilities offered by the technique - without forgetting the extreme mobility of the camera that now allowed the greatest variety of viewpoints - were to give birth to a new aesthetics of the snapshot, one of the characteristics of photography at the turn of the century.

Different kinds of amateurs
Henri Lemoine was the incarnation of the typical Sunday photographer. The hundreds of shots acquired from his descendants reveal the spectator curious of the life of his time. Many amateurs at the turn of the century were artists, painters, sculptors and engravers. Previously, artists with an interest in photography had to appeal to a pratician intermediary to realise pictures of their design, as they lacked time to learn the technique themselves. From then on, they could take their photographs themselves.

Without being an artist himself, but rather an "antique dealer", friend of many painters, Félix Thioller proved highly original in the subject matters he chose and the way he dealt with them. The painter Emile Bernard and the sculptor François Rupert Carabin used a traditional technique with a vision no less traditional. With this same technique, Edgar Degas, whose Portrait of Hortense Howland, recently acquired, is presented, expertly composed his effigies and their lighting.
By contrast, the Nabis Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, who in the 1890's painted scenes inspired in particular by Japanese etchings, using small Kodak cameras, adopted quite naturally this new perspective made of flat tints, off-centred, cut figures characteristic of snapshot vision. The engraver Henri Rivière who was the first in Europe to use wood engraving in the Japanese way, was no less original in his Parisian snapshots.

The Pictorialist movement
This movement was born in Europe, more precisely in England with such photographers as Henry Peech Robinson and Oscar Rejlander, but above all Peter Henry Emerson, who wanted to practise photography as an art.
All were amateurs who did not aim at commercialising their photographs, but who were all highly-skilled technicians, as were those who were to follow them: the Viennese Heinrich Kuehn, the German Adolf de Meyer, the Frenchmen Robert Demachy and Constant Puyo. With the exception of Emerson, they used portable cameras, enlarged their prints and often reprocessed them using bi-chromated gum to give them a pictorial aspect.

These photographers' aim was to escape documentary truth and consequently to adopt a slightly blurred focus. Their pictures often had a symbolist inspiration.
In America, Pictorialism prompted a vivid creativity in such photographers as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Clarence Hudon White, who formed the "Photo Secession" group created in 1902. Their prints, published in the periodical Camera Work, testify to the quality of photomechanical processes at the time (heliogravure, similigravure) that played a large part in the diffusion of Pictorialist photography.

A photographer apart: Eugéne Atget
After exercising the profession of actor, Atget tried his luck as a painter and then turned to photography. He practised it as a craftsman, more in the way he conceived his work than in his technique, which was relatively banal (he used glass plates and various kinds of paper for his prints, but nothing exceptional). Not working from commissions, he still managed acquire regular patrons: illustrators, historians of architecture, artists and public collections (museums and libraries).
It is his project that is primarily fascinating: to reproduce entirely old Paris and its surroundings. He systematically worked to this end, taking pictures of the street from different angles (see the different views of the Rue de la Parcheminerie, from an album devoted to the area around the Saint-Séverin church). For the mansions (Hôtel Le Charron), he proceeded by stages, from the whole to details, from the façade to the courtyard, from the door to the knocker, from the stairs, of which he detailed the railing, to interior spaces, the drawings of wood panels, etc. In addition to this grandiose scheme, he possessed a totally personal vision, in perfect empathy with his subject, like Marville before him, but he also renewed the construction of the shots, with a short focal distance objective that allowed an opening up of spaces and a systematically high point of view.
Finally, if Pictorialist photographers gave birth to some great masterpieces and if some of them, in America, were to be creators after the war, at the turn of the century, it is a "documentary" photographer, Atget, who was considered by the surrealists, by a great connoisseur of modern art such as the New York gallery owner Julien Lévy and by the photographer Walker Evans to be the reference for the 20th century.