“The Evolution of Photography as Art: The Pictorialists and the Impact of Kodak Handheld Cameras”

Obviously, photography is art. There is little to no debate about this now. This is not really a good topic for this project. However, there was moments when photography was still not considered art and that could be a much better area of focus. In the late 19th century, a group of photographers set out to create a photographic art movement. They called themselves the Pictorialists. They used the term Pictorialists to associate themselves with painters (i.e. they were making pictures, not just photographs). I would make the Pictorialists the center of your focus (look to artists like Peter Henry Emerson, Henry Peach Robinson, Robert Demachy, Heinrich Kuhn, Alfred Steiglitz, Clarence White, Edward Steichen, F. Holland Day, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Kasebier, and Annie Brigman). For your thesis, you can focus on the impact of Kodak handheld cameras and the shift to snapshot photography as something the Pictorialists were reacting against. The early Kodaks, especially the Brownie camera, made taking a photo easier than ever before by separating out the act of taking the shot from developing in the darkroom. The Pictorialists emphasized the darkroom process as a way to show the ‘hand’ of the photographer (as well as a way to soften the image to make it look more like a painting, to deny its mechanical nature if you will). Some of the later American Pictorialists broke away to form a group called the Photo-Successionists and this group later helped to form The Straight Photography Movement, which championed the ‘eye’ of the photographer, straight from the camera, bringing it back around to a more camera-based aesthetic. Also, The earlier Pictorialists favored more rural, timeless images, whereas the Straight Photographers favored more urban and hard-edged subjects and shots (without the soft focus). But what The Straight Photographers carried over was the acknowledgment that photography was an expressive art deserving of respect (which they celebrated in important camera clubs and related exhibitions). For your bibliography, please use appropriate academic sources. That means published books and or academic journal articles. Use the research databases from the Cerritos College Library’s website (Ebscohost and JSTOR are the best). Try many search terms including Pictorialist, Kodak Brownie, Snapshot, Straight Photography, etc along with all the names I listed above).