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California pictorialists come into focus at BU Art Gallery exhibition

By David J. Craig

	Will Connell, Southern California Edison Plant at Long Beach, 1932, gelatin silver print, 11 3/4”x 9 3/4”. Dennis Reed Collection Like many artists who identified with pictorialism throughout the first half of the 20th century, Will Connell (1898–1961) often incorporated modernist influences in his work. This image appeared regularly in West Coast exhibitions organized by pictorialists, but its stark design clearly is informed by modernism.

To many historians of photography, 20th-century pictorialism, with its preference for soft focus and hazy prints, is merely an unfortunate detour — a throwback to Impressionism whose adherents after 1910 were naïve traditionalists.

But an upcoming exhibition at the BU Art Gallery reexamines the genre, demonstrating the complexity of much of the photography produced under the rubric of pictorialism during the first half of the 20th century, as well as the pictorial roots of modernists such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Entitled California Dreamin': Camera Clubs and the Pictorial Photography Tradition, the exhibition focuses on work produced in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas, where pictorialism was particularly popular. It runs from January 30 to March 28, with an opening reception on Thursday, January 29, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Prior to the reception, Dennis Reed, dean of arts at Los Angeles Valley College and an expert on California and Japanese pictorialism, will deliver a lecture at the CFA Concert Hall at 6 p.m. Reed has lent several photographs for the exhibition.

Margrethe Mather, Florence Deshon, 1921, bromide print, 9 1/2”x 7 1/2”. Paul J. Getty Museum, Los Angeles With its soft focus, subtle tones, and storytelling quality, this image by Margrethe Mather (1885–1952) exemplifies pictorialist portraiture. Mather and close companion Edward Weston helped found the influential Camera Pictorialists of Los Angeles in 1914, but soon thereafter rejected the aesthetic hallmarks of pictorialism.

California Dreamin' includes work by 47 photographers, among them rare images by Adams, Weston, Arnold Genthe, and Margrethe Mather, and previously unexhibited and never-before-reproduced work by many relatively unknown photographers. Most pieces in the exhibition are by photographers who identified themselves as pictorialists and were associated with camera clubs that championed the genre, such as the San Francisco–based California Camera Club and the Camera Pictorialists of Los Angeles. Such clubs, in addition to providing amateur and professional photographers the opportunity to exchange ideas and socialize, organized influential exhibitions, or salons, for decades after pictorialism fell from favor on the national art scene.

A goal of California Dreamin', says Stacey McCarroll, BU Art Gallery director and curator, is to “defy tired stereotypes” of pictorialists as interested only in hazy landscapes, picturesque genre scenes, and narrative portraits. To that end, the exhibition includes many images from the 1920s, '30s, and '40s that combine modernist influences, such as an attention to urban and industrial subjects and abstract composition, with traditional pictorial practices like manipulating images drastically during the printing process.

“Pictorialism is rooted historically in a visual sensibility related to Impressionism, and it is interested generally in a soft-focus and painterly style of photography that stems from a concern with making photographs artistic,” says McCarroll (GRS'04), a photo historian working toward her Ph.D. “But curators and historians of photography have tended to discount pictorial practice altogether, based on stereotypes. The only thing a lot of people know about pictorialism is that photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston rejected it.”

	Asahachi Kono, Untitled (Tree and Hills), late 1920s, gelatin silver print, 7 3/8”x 11 7/8”. Dennis Reed Collection Asahachi Kono (unknown–1943) was among a large contingent of Japanese photographers working in southern California in the first half of the 20th century. While the composition of this image recalls East Asian landscape painting, its soft focus and broad dark areas give it away as the work of a pictorialist.

In fact, prior to pronouncing pictorialism dead, many artists who went on to define modernist photography were immersed in the genre, and California Dreamin' illustrates the transitions of some of them — it includes Adams' 1923 piece Glacier Point, a remarkably delicate and traditional landscape, and his 1928 Light Hitting Juniper Trunk, a close-up of a statuesque tree trunk that is more characteristic of his definitive work, but with a soft focus that reveals his aesthetic roots. Also featured is Weston's 1916 piece Ted Shawn, a male nude whose subject's languid and romantic pose is at odds with the photographer's later, more straightforward work.

Just as illuminating, perhaps, are accomplished works by dozens of artists virtually unknown outside of California, including Will Connell, Louis Fleckenstein, Toyo Miyatake, and William Mortensen. “These are photographers whose work is very diverse and sophisticated, and quite different from what historians of photography traditionally have called pictorialism,” says McCarroll. “The members of the California camera clubs were constantly discussing what was happening in the art world, and incorporating different styles in their work. Not all pictorialists were putting their heads in the sand and making soft-focus images their whole careers.”

Stacey McCarroll will give a gallery talk on Wednesday, March 10, at 1 p.m. at the BU Art Gallery, 855 Commonwealth Ave. For gallery hours, visit www.bu.edu/art.

23 January 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations