It may be useful to look at the origins of other movements. Here is a quite good listing of various movements. George, if you want to actually do something about a new movement, you going to need to provide leadership and finely tuned political and social skills. And deal with the realization the new movements reflect new realities and technique.
https://onphotography13.wordpress.com/2014/03/12/a-brief-history-of-photographic-art-movements/
Movements seem to primarily be the expression of singular personalities. But also an expression of the technical advances of possibilities of the times and of changes in society.
The first twenty years of photography, from its origins as either of daguerreotypes or of Calotypes was itself the origin of the recurring debate between sharply focused (straight) photography and the artistic photography of the paper processes. This has been a recurrent conflict in a variety of forms, but always as an expression of a different technical basis. The arguments recurred but not exactly as before. After the development of Glass collodion, the sharply focused aesthetic was predominant until the development of naturalism and a debate between Henry Peach Robinson and manipulated images and Peter Henry Emerson and unaltered natural photography.
Pictorialism developed in the 1880s as photography began to open up to the masses with the first Kodak cameras from George Eastman. The Pictorialists strove to go beyond the clinical, focused detail of the photograph, beyond the “snapshot”, to invoke a feeling, a mood or an atmosphere in the print. They might manipulate the print or use a soft focused lens or pinhole. The movement lasted almost 40 years (or 140 years depending on how you think of it). The subject matter was often life and landscapes, architecture, and portraiture.
The Linked Ring (1892-1909) was formed by the Pictorialist photographer George Davidson in England along with other members of the Royal Photographic Society who objected to the more technical emphasis of the Society. The first members included Julia Margaret Cameron and Henry Peach Robinson. Membership in the group generally held the position that photography should be seen as an art form.
The Photo Succession (USA). Alfred Stieglitz (along with Edward Steichen) formed the Photo Succession in 1902 in NYC as a Pictorial group. He later moved toward more urban themes, similar to the American “Ash Can School” (1908-1918) of realistic inner-city painting.
Stieglitz’s’ story may be most relevant to the idea of creating a movement, so I shall return to this particularly American version of Pictorialism.
Expressionism (Germany, 1905-25) used emphasis and distortion to create an emotional response. Consider the distorted nudes of Dritikol and Kertesz from the 20s.
Futurism (Italy, 1909-1944) Giulio Bragaglia used multiple exposure and time-lapse techniques to show movement and dynamism in still photographs, as illustrations of the machine-age Futurist doctrine.
Cubism (Europe c1910) arose just before WWI and is characterized by a reduction of the image to geometrical forms and multiple viewpoints.
Dada (Germany 1915-23) was a movement that followed the Great War and set about to dismantle tradition. One of the most important features was a desire for the influence of chance, of accident. Photo-collage was used to create intellectually challenging absurd non-images. Photograms were also created by placing objects directly on photographic paper and exposing them directly.
Constructivism (Russia 1915) and the Bauhaus (Germany) celebrated the machine in abstract photographs, creating art for the industrial age, a utilitarian art. The paintings were created using strict mathematical and technical principles.
Surrealism (France c1920) aimed to explore the unconscious, using unexpected juxtapositions of objects and spontaneous technique. Andre Breton published the Manifesto in 1924 that established the basis of the movement. Man Ray was a painter and photographer at the centre of this movement.
Modernism has usually, in the United States, been attributed to Stieglitz as well, through his association with Paul Strand and straight photography, but Modernism was a worldwide movement with many “originators”- Germany’s New Objectivity, Surrealists in France, and Constructivists in Russia were all within the Modernist movement.
F.64 (1932, USA) This group was formed in 1932 by, among others, Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogene Cunningham, and Willard Van Dyke. The grouping was short lived, disbanding in practice by 1935, but has had a profound effect in the recurring debate, first encountered in the Daguerreotype vs Calotype affray.
Photojournalism (1920s) with more portable cameras came more “street photography” with Henri Cartier-Bresson (“the decisive moment”) advocating a snapshot style, Berenice Abbot and Helen Levitt documented New York City. Of course photojournalism had been carried on since the 1840s but the widespread use of the style had to wait for more portable cameras.
There are newer forms of movements which I know less about and will leave to others to recount if they choose to.
Back to what George can learn from Stieglitz.
Stieglitz first used written criticism and comment to achieve a specific personal goal; that is to present his circle of friends as the vanguard of independent (while dependent on him) practitioners whose work was promoted as the natural progression of artistic photography. By promoting a specific set of photographers as a
movement of independent artistic photography and he and his associates as the, self-evidently, only future of photography Stieglitz undermined other alternative producers and forums of artistic photography.
He provided a vertical organizational structure combining intellectual control of his producers of product and his advertising and promotion of that product with the venue for sales of that product. This vertical control is exemplified by the central organization “The Photo-Secession” founded in 1902 in such a way as some member never realized that they were members even as the value added aspect of their work was being co-opted.
This was followed a year later by Camera Work, the printed organ of his efforts. As a bully pulpit this was predated by Stieglitz’s editorship of “Camera Notes” of the New York Camera Club. But despite being regularly promoted as independent, Camera Work was used to keep readers informed of the Photo Secession. To photographers west of New York, the journal was the Photo Secession presented as independent, presented as unified, presented as working towards a single aesthetic goal, presented as elite, and presented as the only possible and natural entity for authority over American ( and thusly world) photography. Stieglitz was quick to undercut, as a point of principle rather than debate, other potential leaders such as Julius Strauss, F. Holland Day and later Clarence White and claimed for himself the sole rights to interpret photographic art and its history. Such self- interpretation, in the guise of independence, excluded alternate interpretations.
Three years on from the introduction of his publishing Camera Work, the sales venue of his empire opened as the “Little Galleries”. Here was an “independent space” wherein Stieglitz could control the message and exclude photographers whose questioned or competed with his exclusive leadership. By keeping the display and distribution of Secession production separate, in the gallery and also while on loan to other venues, the validity of the secession message and its elite status was maintained. The Philadelphia exhibition submitted to Stieglitz’s demands concerning control and presentation while the St. Louis exhibition did not. Not surprisingly, The St. Louis exhibition received a disparaging review in Camera Work- old, stale, and ignorant of modern developments, by which of course was meant the imagery of the Stieglitz coterie.
This vertical structure readily acted as a gate keeping structure; there were outsiders who opposed his centralized control, who had no validity, and there were his accredited insiders.
Stieglitz fully understood the need of a multilayered virtual institutional approach to building an artistic movement, while keeping any formal institutional structures in his own hands. His goal was to create the one (linked) ring to control them all.
