Exhibition review Rich amateurs can be thanked for making photography an art: The Museum of Photography presents the trend of pictorialism

Culture|Exhibition review

Photographic art

Pictorialism: the birth of photography 24.4. until the Museum of Finnish Photography (Kaapelitehdas, Tallberginkatu 1 G). Tue – Sun 11–18, Wed 11–20.

Photographic technology was born as early as the 1820s, but it took a long time before photographs began to be considered art. It took a number of lavish amateur photographers who, in the late 19th century, took up hazy inaccurate images and printed unique works of art from them. Thus was born the first international trend in photography: pictorialism.

A recent exhibition at the Museum of Photography shows how pictorialism affected Finland. More than a hundred works from the museum’s own collections are on display. This is the first extensive exhibition review of pictorialism in Finland.

The exhibition, based on extensive research, has been curated by art historians Max Fritze, Sofia Lahti and Anni Wallenius. In connection with the exhibition, Parvs Publishing House has published an excellent non-fiction book on Finnish pictorialism. Both represent a commendably high standard of art historical education.

In his own time Pictorialism, known as “artistic photography,” began to spread around the world in the 1880s and in Finland soon after artistically ambitious amateur photographers became enthusiastic about the idea that photography could be art. The prevailing view is that photography was a mere mechanical recording of external reality that was not believed to be able to compete with the spirituality of the visual arts.

The pictorialists decided to show that photography also has artistic expressive power. They turned their attention to the visual arts of their time — the mystery of symbolism, the softness of Impressionism, and the art of Art Nouveau … —and began to seek similar impressions with their cameras.

Pictorialist the cornerstones of aesthetics were landscapes wrapped in longing haze, ethereal female figures, and the misty streets of cities. Instead of just documenting, it was essential to reach for the mood, aesthetic impression, or emotional state of the moment. A typical example of this is an architect Oiva Kallion (1884–1964) exuding melancholy Orphans in snowfields (1925–29), in which three trees seek refuge in the middle of an endless snow sea.

Through challenging rendering techniques, tinting, and image editing, pictorialists strive to turn their images into unique works of art that embody the personality of their creator. For example Fritz Englund (1870–1951) has in one picture highlighted a jet of water glistening in the sunlight with an eraser. Colorful background cardboards and calligraphically written work titles crowned the uniqueness of the prints.

In some places, pictorial works could be thought of as paintings or etchings. Contrary to the common misconception, however, the pictorialists did not try to copy the visual arts but only to adapt to the art conceptions of the time, from which the visual arts also drew.

With contemporaries there was no difficulty in accepting pictorialist images as art: when “artistic photographs” were first presented at the Ateneum in 1903, they received a dazzling reception from both the public and critics.

What makes pictorialism special is that instead of professional photographers, it was heralded by rich amateurs who had the freedom to break the formulas of commercial professional photography. However, it was not a question of any snaps, but of technical skills, the skills of which in some places surpassed those of professionals. Amateur clubs, such as the Amatörfotografklubben i Helsingfors, founded in 1889, became important promoters of photography.

The main figure in Finnish pictorialism was a Norwegian-born who moved to Finland at the age of 19 Daniel Nyblin (1856–1923). For his bread work, he took traditional portrait pictures in the studio he founded in Helsinki, but in his free time he experimented with more artistic images. Self-portrait (1880s), which is closed to its inner reality, is known to be Finland’s first pictorialist photograph.

Measuring the extent of surviving production, Fritz Englund, the most significant Finnish pictorialist, made his career as the director of the Finnish Nail Office. In his photography hobby, he focused on photographing his family, and photography seemed to be a common play, especially between Englund and his daughters. About 3,000 images of Englund’s heritage can be found in the collections of the Museum of Photography.

Businessman Wladimir Schohin (1862–1934) was a pioneer in color photography in Finland. His stunning autochrome color images have incredible vividness, making it hard to believe the images were taken more than a hundred years ago.

Artistic photography was a hobby, especially for men, and women often had no say in gentlemen’s clubs. A significant exception in the masculine history of pictorialism is the Finnish-born Siri Fischer-Schnéevoigt (1870–1948), who made a spectacular career as a portrait photographer in Berlin’s social circles and got his pictures on the pages of international photographic magazines.

Pictorialism began to disappear from fashion in the 1920s, although in Finland it lasted a little longer than elsewhere in Europe. Modernist, high-definition photography took over the living space, and the reality-escaped aesthetics of pictorialism began to seem out of date after the horrors of World War I.

Now, just over a hundred years later, interest in pictorialism has resurfaced both here and in the world. For example, the exhibition on Swedish pictorialism ended at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

The exhibition at the Museum of Photography is thus both on the edge of time and at the heart of the basics, presenting a little-noticed trend that was the first to make photography an art.

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