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Pictorialism is an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the later 19th and early 20th centuries. There is no standard definition of the term, but in general it refers to a style in which the photographer has somehow manipulated what would otherwise be a straightforward photograph as a means of creating an image rather than simply recording it. Typically, a pictorial photograph appears to lack a sharp focus, is printed in one or more colors other than black-and-white and may have visible brush strokes or other manipulation of the surface. For the pictorialist, a photograph, like a painting, drawing or engraving, was a way of projecting an emotional intent into the viewer's realm of imagination.
Paul Strand was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. In 1936, he helped found the Photo League, a cooperative of photographers who banded together around a range of common social and creative causes. His diverse body of work, spanning six decades, covers numerous genres and subjects throughout the Americas, Europe, and Africa.
Helen Levitt was an American photographer and cinematographer. She was particularly noted for her street photography around New York City. David Levi Strauss described her as "the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time."
Aaron Siskind was an American photographer whose work focuses on the details of things, presented as flat surfaces to create a new image independent of the original subject. He was closely involved with, if not a part of, the abstract expressionist movement, and was close friends with painters Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning.
Louis Stettner was an American photographer of the 20th century whose work included streetscapes, portraits and architectural images of New York and Paris. His work has been highly regarded because of its humanity and capturing the life and reality of the people and streets. Starting in 1947, Stettner photographed the changes in the people, culture, and architecture of both cities. He continued to photograph New York and Paris up until his death.
Morris Engel was an American photographer, cinematographer and filmmaker best known for making the first good-quality, internationally-recognized American film "independent" of Hollywood studios, Little Fugitive (1953), in collaboration with his wife, photographer Ruth Orkin, and their friend, writer Raymond Abrashkin.
Larry Silver is an American photographer. He was born in the Bronx. While a student at the High School of Industrial Art in Manhattan he met members of the Photo League, among them Lou Bernstein, W. Eugene Smith and Weegee. He won a first prize in the Scholastic-Ansco Photography Awards, and a scholarship to the Art Center School in Los Angeles. Silver takes black-and-white photographs, mainly documenting the places he has lived: Santa Monica Beach, California; New York City; and Westport, Connecticut.
Seymour Kattelson, better known as Sy Kattelson, was an American photographer whose earliest work documents working class New Yorkers during the years immediately following World War II. He was an early practitioner of street photography and was associated with the Photo League from 1947 until its closing in 1951. His portraits, frequently taken without his subjects' awareness while traveling through the streets or riding the city's subways, convey the dignity of their lives as lived in public places. The depth of his photographs often comes from the tension between the grittiness of their urban settings and the contemplative sense of his subjects' as being lost within themselves. He died in Rhinebeck, New York in November 2018 at the age of 95.
Arthur Leipzig was an American photographer who specialized in street photography and was known for his photographs of New York City. In 2004, he won the Lucie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Fine Art Photography.
Sid Grossman was an American photographer, teacher, and social activist.
Sol Libsohn was a self-taught, documentary photographer.
Eliot Elisofon was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist.
Arnold Eagle was a Hungarian-American photographer and cinematographer, known for his socially concerned documentary photographs of the 1930s and 1940s.
Rosalie Gwathmey was an American painter and photographer known for her photos of black southern communities around her hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina.
Martin Edward Elkort was an American photographer, illustrator and writer known primarily for his street photography. Prints of his work are held and displayed by several prominent art museums in the United States. His photographs have regularly appeared in galleries and major publications. Early black and white photographs by Elkort feature the fabled Lower East Side in Manhattan, New York City, showing its ethnic diversity, myriad streets and cluttered alleys. The Coney Island amusement park in Brooklyn was another favorite site during that period. His later work depicts street scenes from downtown Los Angeles and Tijuana, Mexico. Throughout Martin Elkort's long career as a photographer, he always showed the positive, joyful side of life in his candid images.
Walter A. Rosenblum (1919–2006) was an American photographer. He photographed the World War II D-Day landing at Normandy in 1944. He was the first Allied photographer to enter the liberated Dachau concentration camp. He received several military decorations including a Purple Heart. His photography is on display in museums around the world.
The New York school of photography is identified by Jane Livingston as "a loosely defined group of photographers who lived and worked in New York City during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s" and who, although disinclined to commit themselves to any group or belief, "shared a number of influences, aesthetic assumptions, subjects, and stylistic earmarks". Livingston writes that their work was marked by humanism, a tough-minded style, photojournalistic techniques, the influence of film noir and the photographers Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, and Henri Cartier-Bresson; and that it avoided "the anecdotal descriptiveness of most photojournalism" and the egoism of American action painting, and indeed that it was remarkably little influenced by contemporary painting or graphic design. Livingston selects as key exponents of the New York school of photography Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Alexey Brodovitch, Ted Croner, Bruce Davidson, Don Donaghy, Louis Faurer, Robert Frank, Sid Grossman, William Klein, Saul Leiter, Leon Levinstein, Helen Levitt, Lisette Model, David Vestal, and Weegee.
Sonia Handelman Meyer was an American photographer, best known for her street photography as a member of the New York Photo League.
Lucy Ashjian (1907–1993) was an American photographer. She is known as a member of the Photo League a photographer's cooperative in New York City. Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona and the Museum of the City of New York.
Vivian Cherry was an American photographer best known for her street photography. She was a member of the New York Photo League.
References
- Klein, Mason and Evans, Catherine: "The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936–1951". The Jewish Museum and Yale University Press, 2011
- Maddow, Ben: "Faces: A Narrative History of the Portrait in Photography". New York Graphic Society, Little Brown, 1977
- Newhall, Nancy Wynne: This Is the Photo League, The Photo League, 1948.
- Robinson, Gerald H.: Photography, History & Science. Carl Mautz, 2006, chapter V, pages 31–70.
- Tucker, Anne Wilkes. This Was the Photo League. Chicago: Stephen Daiter Gallery, 2001
- History of Photography, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Summer 1994). Special issue devoted to the Photo League.
- Documentary Photography. Life Library of Photography, Time-Life Books, 1972
