If Pictorialist,

[Dave Wooten]

If pictoralist photographers had had available film and paper with the speeds we have today, would pin hole photography possibly have been more used as a medium of expression and interpretation?

 

[keithwms]

Well, consider the opposing force: armed with more film speed, many photographers of that era would have simply gone to smaller apertures and faster shutter speeds. So the faster films probably would have been of greater use to the f/64 way of thinking. I recall one Adams photograph of a leaf against a barn or the like; his technical comment was that the breezes delayed him a long while before he could get what he wanted.

unsolicited side comment...:
I have trouble with the tendency to equate pictorialism with 'fuzzy wuzzy' or overall softness. I realize that that is how some define(d) it, and I also realize that that is not what you are implying, but... to me, pictorialism at its best (e.g. early Weston and colleagues) was an intuitive and emotionally-driven movement. Not just overall softness.

 

[Dave Wooten]

Well, consider the opposing force: armed with more film speed, many photographers of that era would have simply gone to smaller apertures and faster shutter speeds. So the faster films probably would have been of greater use to the f/64 way of thinking. I recall one Adams photograph of a leaf against a barn or the like; his technical comment was that the breezes delayed him a long while before he could get what he wanted.

unsolicited side comment...:
I have trouble with the tendency to equate pictorialism with 'fuzzy wuzzy' or overall softness. I realize that that is how some define(d) it, and I also realize that that is not what you are implying, but... to me, pictorialism at its best (e.g. early Weston and colleagues) was an intuitive and emotionally-driven movement. Not just overall softness.

Good points Keith!

 

[jovo]

Since the objective of the pictorialists in the late 19th and very early 20th century was to legitimize photography as art by emulating the quasi impressionistic look of that era's paintings a gamut of techniques were used. Besides soft focus, there could be extensive retouching, painting on the print and/or negative, toning, printing on highly textured paper, etching the negative and a variety of other manipulations. It's ironic that some of the filters that can be employed in Photoshop echo that early era very strongly despite nearly unlimited "film speed" equivalents in digigraphy.

Since photography has been long established as a legitimate art form, the tenets of modernism no longer need to be taken as essential to validate the medium. But in its era, even if film speeds were comparable to our current stock, pictorialism would probably still have needed to exist and pinhole work, and the methods listed above, would have likely been employed to "prove" that photography wasn't merely an artless mechanical medium.

 

[removed account4]

i think if they has fast films they still would have done exactly what they
did ... just like the pictorialists and bromoilists & wet plate &c people today
are doing.

 

[ntenny]

i think if they has fast films they still would have done exactly what they
did ... just like the pictorialists and bromoilists & wet plate &c people today
are doing.

I dunno; a lot of the people doing historical techniques today are striving for historical accuracy rather than developing a style in real time, as it were. The original perpetrators might well have done things differently if they'd had access to different tools, I suppose.

My great-grandpa was basically a pictorialist early in his career, but I think the style lost its allure for him as it became sort of gimmicky. From his writings it seems that he was really thinking along impressionist lines, but thought that pictorialism per se got kind of stuck on a certain visual *style* and lost sight of its original ideas. He certainly kept taking up faster films and newer techniques as they became available, and did a lot of pinhole photography throughout his life, but that may have had more to do with a "try anything" temperament than with pictorialism.

-NT