Friday, 2 September 2011

Pictorialism

In the late 1800s, a group of photographers who became known as pictoralists wanted to make there shot stand out They altered their images by hand scratching the negatives and using brushes to soften and blur parts of the photographs during the printing process. The Pictorialist's main concern was not their subjects but, rather to make photography a viable art form.
The term Pictorialism is used to describe photographs that make images not about what’s in the photo but about how it comes together For Pictorialists it was about the emotional impact of the image and how it was made,(they thought that was more important that was in front of the camera).
It was using a group of photos to create one.


Henry Peach Robinson
 one of the greatest photographers of his time. His most famous photograph is “Fading Away”, is a composition of five negatives, in which he shows a young girl dying of tuberculosis surrounded by her family. It was very controversial, because many felt that it was acceptable for the painters to approach this kind of tragic and intimate moments, but it was not appropriate for a photographer to do so.
http://www.vrestrepo.com/two/page7.html
Henry Peach Robinson
 “Fading Away” (1858)

1 comment:

  1. Congratulations on being the first, or one of the first, to post on Pictorialism and being up to date with all your entries:) This Peach Robinson example is a beauty, and the fact that it is a composite is interesting in the debate that we have now about "photographic truth". Well done.

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