Pictorialism in Europe: Robert Demachy
Robert Demachy, the French Pictorialist photographer born into wealth and freed from every material constraint, devoted his life to elevating photography into art through alchemical printing techniques. This article explores his biography, his photographic philosophy and the striking relevance of his ideas in today's world of AI-threatened image making.
F. Holland Day: Beauty, Belief, and the Male Form
F. Holland Day was a leading Pictorialist photographer and a pioneer in the fight for photography as fine art. Eclipsed by Stieglitz, nearly erased by fire and history, his vision of beauty, belief and the male form remains a powerful lesson for any photographer today.
Alfred Cheney Johnston: Beauty as Artifice, Nudity as Art
Alfred Cheney Johnston, official photographer of the Ziegfeld Follies, built his career on beauty, artifice and a painterly vision of the nude that institutional photography chose to ignore. A Pictorialist working stubbornly against the tide of modernism, his rediscovered work challenges us to reconsider what fine art nude photography can and should be.
From the past a source for artistic nude photography future: William Mortensen: The Antichrist of Hollywood
William Mortensen, the great Pictorialist photographer of the 1930s, was deliberately erased from photography history by Ansel Adams and the Group f/64. A Hollywood veteran, darkroom alchemist and visual psychologist, his grotesque nudes and occult imagery are today recognized as a direct precursor to digitally manipulated photography.