A new show argues the Pictorialists weren’t imitating painting so much as staging theatre, with models, costumes and sets.
Stage Craft: Pictorialist Photography and Performance opened at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art on 11 October and runs until 31 January, in the Ala Story and Photography Galleries. Lily Allen, the museum’s guest curator for photography, is one of its curators.
The premise is that Pictorialism and performance grew up together. Around 1900 the photographers arguing that a photograph could be art were borrowing from dance, acting, stagecraft, storytelling and the earliest cinematography, and they were doing it literally. They worked with models, actors and dancers, built sets, and drew their scenes from literature, classical myth and history. The studio, the stage, the city and the landscape all get treated as settings for the same kind of visual drama.
Why that reframing is useful
The lazy version of Pictorialism is that it was photography with an inferiority complex, softening its focus and roughing up its surfaces in the hope of being mistaken for a painting. We’ve argued before that this sells them short, and that their real claim, that what the camera records is only the beginning, turned out to be correct.
Putting performance at the center sharpens that. If you’re directing a dancer on a hillside, you aren’t recording something you found, you’re building something and then photographing it. The soft focus stops looking like an apology for the medium and starts looking like lighting design, which is how a theatre would have treated it.
It also puts the staged photograph a lot further back than most people place it. Constructed images are usually treated as a contemporary idea, something that arrived with Cindy Sherman or Jeff Wall. The Pictorialists were doing it with glass plates and costumes a century earlier.
The image to look for
The museum’s own materials lead with Anne Brigman’s The Breeze, a gelatin silver print from around 1910 that belongs to the collection. Brigman is the right choice for a show about performance, because she photographed figures, frequently herself, in the Sierra Nevada, and the pictures are plainly directed rather than observed. She was also one of the few women admitted to the Photo Secession, which is its own piece of history.
The museum is at 1130 State Street in Santa Barbara, and the show has a run of nearly four months.
Featured photograph by Anne Brigman, untitled, around 1910, public domain.