Photographers: Are you a Pictorialist or a Modernist?

How Photoshop (and Gen-AI) fit in the historical swing of photography

An uncropped “pure” shot by the author is very modernist in it’s approach — a little abstract, very sharp, naturally formal and almost unnaturally simple. [From “The Photograph as Haiku” (Rubin, 2023)]

In the early years of photography there was a sense it was all a mechanical reproduction of the world, the way we might have thought of a Xerox copy. Cameras were large, processing was laborious, and exposures were long. Almost all photos being made were portraits, and if not a portrait, a landscape.

But it wasn’t “Art.” The model for art was painting — it took skill and talent, and the subject matter was highly considered and purposeful. It was created after years of training and through many hours of applied effort. The photographers were pushing a button. Click. And then doing a lot of chemistry. The process just didn’t seem like art.

But a number of photographers rejected this position. They felt photography could be art; and it became a movement known as “pictorialism” — where the photographers didn’t just push the button; they used additional work to transform a snap into “art-photography.”

Pioneering pictorialist Oscar Gustav Rejlander “Two Ways of Life” (1857) — a print constructed in post production from numerous negatives.

From the 1860s and for more than fifty years, pictorialist pioneers like Henry Peach Robinson, Oscar…