Naturalist Photography
From 1880 to 1920
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The study of Naturalism in photography may be one of the last frontiers
in the history of photography. Naturalism was the principal forerunner of
Pictorialism in art photography. Although the Naturalists worked to create
photographs that were sharply focused, simple in composition, and evoked a
sense of serenity between man and nature, they also managed to imbue
ordinary everyday subjects with a sense of artistry. Eventually this led to
Pictorialism, and in many ways the Photo-Secession movement emerged as a
reaction to the Naturalist style. The Photo-Secession not only seceded from
existing photography clubs in a political sense, but also seceded
aesthetically and stylistically. Historians have long acknowledged the break
between Naturalism and Pictorialism, and the Pictorialist movement has been
studied in some depth. But the Naturalist movement, which gave birth to
Pictorialism and the Photo- Secession, has barely been addressed.
Like other art forms, photography responds to the economic and cultural
climate of its day. In the mid-nineteenth century,in Britain and the
Unineted States, the sweeping changes brought on by the Industrial
Revolution were responsible for artistic movements which looked back to
earlier times, to the old way of doing things before industrialization
changed mankind forever. The countryside was rapidly despoiled by mining,
mills, and factories which dominated an unfamiliar industrial landscape.
Advances in industrial machinery changed rural life profoundly.
Mechanization of farm work drove laborers from the fields to mines, mills,
and factories, as city life replaced country life. The contrasts between the
rich and the poor, and between the powerful and the powerless, were extreme.
With the advent of mass production, workers replaced skilled craftsmen and
the pride of accomplishment and ownership was lost. These massive social
changes were reflected in literature, art, photography, and the popular
culture. Artists and their audiences struggled to hold on to what was
important in life in the face of radical change and industrial and social
upheaval. Naturalist photography was part of the reaction to the Industrial
Revolution.
The Naturalist aesthetic was built on the stylistic trends of European
painting during the 1850s. The artists of this period turned to the
representation of the familiar and human. Known to us as Realism, this
stylistic trend in European painting was defined as a modern style, isolated
from the past, and it reacted against the advances of science, technology,
and industrialization. Their paintings glorify the working classes and
rural peasantry, depicting the dignity of their simplest labors, their
closeness to nature, and their consequential spiritual health. This
provided the foundation for the Naturalist photographers who worked in the
1880s and 1890s.
Although these ideals are reflected in the work of an array of English
photographers of the 1860-70s, they are most eloquently embodied in the
Naturalist photographs of Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936). Realistically
recording the English landscape, principally in Norfolk and Suffolk, Emerson
strove to achieve a timeless vision of the land and its inhabitants. Many
of his works depict people engaged in traditional labors or pastimes, images
that seem as if they could have been made a hundred years earlier. Even in
the titles of his photographs, Emerson selected distinctive terms of
dialect; Rowing Home the Schoof Stuff or Cutting the Gladden not only show
his reverence for the old trades and farming methods, but also suggest how
these terms grew from an ancient and still thriving folk culture. The
dignity and spiritual depth of living in a traditional harmony with the
natural world was the photographer's continual aspiration. "The nearer we
get to Nature the sweeter will be our lives," Emerson wrote, "and never
shall we attain the true secret of happiness until we identify ourselves as
part of Nature." Emerson's wide-ranging influences helped to solidify the
Naturalist movement in British and American photography.
The Naturalist aesthetic of the 1880s, especially in the United States,
was more of a pervasive mood of the country rather than a self-conscious
artistic movement. Naturalism permeated every aspect of American culture.
Reaction to the dehumanization of the Industrial Age was coupled with the
disenchantment over the politics of the industrial economy that helped to
cause the Civil War. There was a new distrust of technology because
technology had made warfare so efficient. This discontent was reflected in
a fascination with nature and the mythology of the undeveloped American
frontier, where the individual could establish his own relationship with the
creator.
Landscape had long been a primary subject for American artists. The
immense stretches of unexplored frontier were represented as symbols of the
transcendental spirituality of nature. While European painters and
photographers were primarily concerned with genre scenes and less with
natural landscape, the American painters and photographers such as A.W. Dow,
W. J. Mullins, and W. B. Post produced more scenes of natural landscape.
American painters Alfred Bierstadt and Frederic Church explored the vast
wilderness on a grand scale. The exhibition of their paintings not only
brought unseen sights to the city dwellers of the East, but also a
reflection of the spirit of America. In America the Naturalists were
chiefly inspired by the natural environment, untouched by the hand of man.
There is an agelessness in their work that makes the scene feel like it
could be from any period. When there is evidence of man's work, it is often
in historical scenes or scenes of Native Americans, rather than industry,
trains, steamships or other symbols of industry. The American Naturalists
were also interested in farms and farmers, as well as craftsmen and older
methods of production. There was a reverence for the old trades, crafts,
and farming methods which harked back to earlier, simpler times.
In the 1880s photography underwent a transformation of its own. The
cumbersome and technically demanding wet plate camera was replaced by the
lighter and easier to use dry plate camera. Because of the relative
manageability of the new cameras, many amateurs began to make photographs
both as a documentation of family life and as a tool of personal artistic
expression. Technical improvements, affordability, and the convenience of
camera equipment prompted explosive growth in the popularity of photography
as an amateur pastime. Many of these photographers were amateur only in the
sense that they were not employed in the profession. The Naturalist
aesthetic was strong among the amateurs who created photographs with a
theme of the natural environment. Generally, their compositions were
simple, straightforward and not formal, and their prints were sharply
focused.
Although Alfred Stieglitz is best known for his pictorial works and his
association with the Photo-Secession, he too was influenced by the
Naturalists. His work of the late 1880s to early 1890s frequently employed
methods and themes favored by the Naturalists. His 1894 photograph,The Net
Mender, represents a young Dutch woman clothed in traditional garb sitting
alone on a sand dune mending a fishing net. The focus is sharp, the
composition is simple, and there is a timeless and serene quality to the
photograph. In Early Morn, 1894, the sharply-focused foreground, the
subject of the "noble peasant", and the sense of serenity are all
reminiscent of Emerson's photographs. Around the turn of the century,
however, Stieglitz began to lead a movement away from Naturalist ideals.
The growing differences between the Naturalists and the Pictorialists caused
much debate among photographers especially in many of the local camera clubs
and salon committees. While both Naturalists and Pictorialists were
concerned with making artistic photographs, the Pictorialists were more
intent on convincing the rest of the world that photography was a valid art
form. To accomplish this they used soft focus to emulate the feeling of
impressionist painting. They used new photographic processes such as gum
and bromoil to achieve painterly effects and dramatic illumination. Some
photographers manipulated their photographs during developing; Frank Eugene
drew on his negatives in the darkroom and Gertrude Kasebier experimented
with selectively painting on the photographic emulsion.
Prompted by Modernism and Futurism in painting and sculpture, the
Pictorialists abandoned natural subject matter in favor of glorified views
of industry and urban landscape. Stieglitz led this fundamental change by
celebrating the growth of cities and industrialization in photographs such
as The City of Ambition, 1910, Old and New New York, 1910, and The Hand of
Man, 1902. Others, such as George Seeley and Clarence White, were more
interested in the arcane and mysterious, and looked to Symbolist painting
for allegory and iconography. Their compositional concerns were different
also. Form became much more important. Many photographers composed their
images with lines parallel to the edges of the print. Others experimented
with either a very low or a very high horizon line. Photographers, such as
Heinrich Kuhn, used special techniques and processes to eliminate detail in
large areas in order to further emphasize forms. Seeley went so far as to
make abstractions of nature rather than to reproduce it as the Naturalists
had done. With the acceptance of Pictorialism, some photographers turned
away from the Naturalist aesthetic. William Post produced sensitive
Naturalist photographs early in his career, among these was his seascape
with dramatic clouds. The photograph is a straightforward, sharply-focused,
traditional composition in which he remains true to nature. However, Post's
later works are soft-focused and are more formally composed, often using
high horizon lines with unusually large foregrounds.
Naturalism was among the formative currents in the early history of
photography. Although the importance of its chief proponent, Peter Henry
Emerson, has been widely acknowledged, the conceptual and aesthetic context
of his art has been largely overlooked. Many other photographers practiced
this style in Britain and the United States and their significance is only
now being acknowledged. The Americans among these photographers are usually
identified as Pictorialists. In truth, they are quite different. This
collection brings together the work of more than sixty Naturalist
photographers, many of whose work is surfacing in the art world for the
first time. The collection illustrates the common aesthetic and provides a
solid foundation for the further study of the Naturalist movement. |
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