The Linked Ring (also known as "The Brotherhood of the Linked Ring") was a British photographic society created to propose and defend photography as being just as much an art as it was a science. Members dedicated to the craft looked for new techniques that would cause the less knowledgeable to steer away, persuading photographers and enthusiasts to experiment with chemical processes, printing techniques and new styles. [1]
Photography was interpreted in two ways: art photography and science photography. [2] The science of photography requires practice that determines the outcome of the image, whereas the art aspect of photography concerns itself with the aesthetic experience and success of the photograph to the viewer. [3] These differences created a tension in the craft that the Linked Ring sought to change.
The group was founded in May 1892 by Henry Peach Robinson, former Photographic Society of Great Britain member George Davison, and Henry Van der Weyde. [4] The Brotherhood was "a means of bringing together those who are interested in the development of the highest form of Art of which Photography is capable." [5] Membership of the group was by invitation only; other members included James Craig Annan, Walter Benington, Arthur Burchett, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Frederick H. Evans, Alfred Horsley Hinton, Frederick Hollyer, Harold Moritmer Lamb, Richard Keene, Alexander Keighley, [6] Paul Martin, Alfred Maskell, Lydell Sawyer (aka Lyd Sawyer), [7] William Smedley-Aston, Frank Sutcliffe, J. B. B. Wellington, and, later, Americans Rudolf Eickemeyer, Jr., Clarence H. White and Alfred Stieglitz. Robinson's son, Ralph Winwood Robinson, was also a member. [8]
Although works by female photographers such as those by Zaida Ben-Yusuf were exhibited at the annual shows during the 1890s, it was not until 1900 that Gertrude Käsebier became one of the first elected female members of the Ring. [9]
In November 1893, Robinson created the Photographic Salon, [10] an annual exhibit event in England whose aim was to "exhibit [images] that are description of pictorial photography in which there is distinct evidence of personal feeling and execution." [11] As a result, interest grew in processes such as gum bi-chromate, oil pigment and transfer, and supported the trend in producing images not for reproduction, but works of high value, as well as creating interest in surface texture, papers, and colour of print. [12]
In 1896 they began publishing The Linked Ring Papers, which were circulated annually to members until 1909 to promote and discuss the aesthetics and practice of pictorialism.
The Photo-Secession was founded by photographer Alfred Stieglitz in 1902. Stieglitz wanted to show that photography had artistic expression similar to that of painting and sculpture, emphasizing further the craftsmanship abilities of photographers. Photo-Secession members were also called American Links, and displayed works in the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at Fifth Avenue, New York City. Members include Mary Devens, Frank Eugene, Gertrude Käsebier, William B. Dyer, Eva Watson-Schütze, Edward Steichen, Edmund Stirling, and Clarence H. White. [12]
Pictorialist James Craig Annan was born into a household at the forefront of photography technology. In 1866 his father created a four-foot print of an eleven-foot painting with the new process of carbon printing. This became Annan’s primary influence to become a skilled photographer himself. At a young age, he learned the process of photogravure in Vienna on a trip with his father. This process allowed Annan to work like an etcher —sharpening, shading, or blurring areas of the picture, describing this process as "a long drawn out pleasure". [13]
Frederick H. Evans was responsible for leading the Linked Ring's photography magazines, writing publications for the newspaper, and installations at Photo Salon. One of the most gifted and sensitive of "the Links", Evans is known for his images of architecture, specifically cathedrals. He is known to have spent weeks living in the cathedrals he photographed waiting for ideal lighting conditions to reveal the poetry in his subjects. [12]
Frank S. Sutcliffe was most well known for his image "Water Rats", exemplary of being one of the first images showing depth of field accomplished in camera. [12]
The Brotherhood represented themselves with a logo of three interlinked rings, which were meant in part to represent the Masonic beliefs of Good, True, and Beautiful. [14]
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.
Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his 50-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz was known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the early part of the 20th century, where he introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S. He was married to painter Georgia O'Keeffe.
Henry Peach Robinson was an English pictorialist photographer best known for his pioneering combination printing - joining multiple negatives or prints to form a single image; an early example of photomontage. He joined vigorously in contemporary debates in the photographic press and associations about the legitimacy of 'art photography' and in particular the combining of separate images into one.
291 is the commonly known name for an internationally famous art gallery that was located in Midtown Manhattan at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York City from 1905 to 1917. Originally called the "Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession", the gallery was established and managed by photographer Alfred Stieglitz.
Gertrude Käsebier was an American photographer. She was known for her images of motherhood, her portraits of Native Americans, and her promotion of photography as a career for women.
Clarence Hudson White was an American photographer, teacher and a founding member of the Photo-Secession movement. He grew up in small towns in Ohio, where his primary influences were his family and the social life of rural America. After visiting the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, he took up photography. Although he was completely self-taught in the medium, within a few years he was internationally known for his pictorial photographs that captured the spirit and sentimentality of America in the early twentieth century. As he became well known for his images, White was sought out by other photographers who often traveled to Ohio to learn from him. He became friends with Alfred Stieglitz and helped advance the cause of photography as a true art form. In 1906 White and his family moved to New York City in order to be closer to Stieglitz and his circle and to further promote his own work. While there he became interested in teaching photography and in 1914 he established the Clarence H. White School of Photography, the first educational institution in America to teach photography as art. Due to the demands of his teaching duties, his own photography declined and White produced little new work during the last decade of his life. In 1925 he suffered a heart attack and died while teaching students in Mexico City.
Anne Wardrope Brigman was an American photographer and one of the original members of the Photo-Secession movement in America.
Camera Work was a quarterly photographic journal published by Alfred Stieglitz from 1903 to 1917. It presented high-quality photogravures by some of the most important photographers in the world, with the goal to establish photography as a fine art. It has been called "consummately intellectual", "by far the most beautiful of all photographic magazines", and "a portrait of an age [in which] the artistic sensibility of the nineteenth century was transformed into the artistic awareness of the present day."
The Photo-Secession was an early 20th century movement that promoted photography as a fine art in general and photographic pictorialism in particular.
Zaida Ben-Yusuf was an American portrait photographer based in New York. She was known for her artistic portraits of wealthy, fashionable, and famous Americans during the turn of the 19th–20th century.
Alice Boughton was an early 20th-century American photographer known for her photographs of many literary and theatrical figures of her time. She was a Fellow of Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession, a circle of photographers whose artistic efforts succeeded in raising photography to a fine art form.
Eva Watson-Schütze (1867–1935) was an American photographer who was one of the founding members of the Photo-Secession.
Frank Eugene was an American-born photographer who was a founding member of the Photo-Secession and one of the first university-level professors of photography in the world.
Camera Notes was a photographic journal published by the Camera Club of New York from 1897 to 1903. It was edited for most of that time by photographer Alfred Stieglitz and was considered the most significant American photography journal of its time. It is valuable today both as a record of photographic aesthetics of the time and for its many high-quality photogravures by photographers such as Stieglitz, James Craig Annan, F. Holland Day, Robert Demachy, Frances Benjamin Johnston, Gertrude Kasebier and Clarence H. White.
Mary Devens was an American photographer who was considered one of the ten most prominent pictorial photographers of the early 20th century. She was listed as a founding member of Alfred Stieglitz’s famed Photo-Secession.
Harriet Candace "Rose" Clark (1852–1942) was an early 20th-century American painter and pictorial photographer. She is best known for the photographs she exhibited with Elizabeth Flint Wade under their joint names, either as "Rose Clark and Elizabeth Flint Wade" or as "Misses Clark and Wade".
Joseph Turner Keiley was an early 20th-century photographer, writer and art critic. He was a close associate of photographer Alfred Stieglitz and was one of the founding members of the Photo-Secession. Over the course of his life Keiley's photographs were exhibited in more than two dozen international exhibitions, and he achieved international acclaim for both his artistic style and his writing.
James Craig Annan was a pioneering Scottish-born photographer and Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society.
The participation of women in photography goes back to the very origins of the process. Several of the earliest women photographers, most of whom were from Britain or France, were married to male pioneers or had close relationships with their families. It was above all in northern Europe that women first entered the business of photography, opening studios in Denmark, France, Germany, and Sweden from the 1840s, while it was in Britain that women from well-to-do families developed photography as an art in the late 1850s. Not until the 1890s, did the first studios run by women open in New York City.
Alfred Horsley Hinton was an English landscape photographer, best known for his work in the pictorialist movement in the 1890s and early 1900s. As an original member of the Linked Ring and editor of The Amateur Photographer, he was one of the movement's staunchest advocates. Hinton wrote nearly a dozen books on photographic technique, and his photographs were exhibited at expositions throughout Europe and North America.
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