April 2025, Great Pictorialist Photographers – Rose Valley

News about happenings at Deliberate Light and photography instruction (see Digital Photo cademy). My views on this month’s photography topic: Great Pictorialist Photographers in Rose Valley. To get these newsletters by email a month before they are posted here, go to the DeliberateLight.com website and click on Newsletter Signup.

NEWS

Upcoming Workshops. I am scheduled to teach workshops for Digital Photo Academy on June 7th at Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia. You can sign up here if interested.

· Mastering Your Camera Controls (1.5 hours) – intended for DSLR/Mirrorless/Compact cameras (smartphone tutorial available separately)

· Composition in the Field (3 hours) – walking tour around the venue with instruction and hands-on practice composing photos (bring any camera)

New Photo.

Tulip Delicacy. You cannot help but admire the gently glowing color and delicate lines of these flower petals. Seeing this beauty at this time of year and in this era of unrestrained ugliness, gives me a little hope.

(Baltimore, 2025)

For a more detailed, enlarged view and to get it printed, see it on my website.

VIEWS

Great Pictorialist Photographers – Rose Valley.

Pictorialism was a movement in photography that began in the late 1800’s with the goal of achieving credibility as an art form by trying to emulate paintings. Photographers adopted many of the composition elements of painting (lighting, positioning, perspective, etc.) and used techniques unique to photography (out-of-focus, lens filtering/coatings for dream-like effect), compositing (to augment reality), darkroom editing (cropping, dodging/burning, scratched negatives to highlight/obscure and exaggerate tonality a la chiaroscuro), and textured papers or brushed-on gelatin and wax (for a hand-crafted look). By 1870 or so, the term “Pictorialist” crept into use to define this international movement and in 1902, Alfred Stieglitz formed a group called the Photo-Secession to further the cause of Pictorialism.

Nationally, Philadelphia was a center of photographic activity. The Photographic Society of Philadelphia (PSP) had sponsored or co-sponsored many of the large number of national and local photographic exhibitions from 1880 to 1900. In 1898, in a remarkable step towards acceptance of photography as a fine art, the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts decided to host a photographic exhibition and invited the PSP to co-sponsor it. This became the first of the four very successful annual Philadelphia Photographic Salons that achieved international fame.

Several influential Pictorialists resided in Rose Valley at the height of popularity of Pictorialism, around the turn of the 20th Century. I doubt you have ever heard of them.

Alice Barber Stephens was, at the time, a well-known and highly successful illustrator. She also turned out to be a skilled photographer. Trained at PAFA as a painter and learning the use of photography as an aid to painting from Thomas Eakins, her photographs display a painter’s eye for light and composition. Stephens was selected as a juror for the first Philadelphia Photographic Salon in 1898 where she exhibited several photographs. This beautifully lit photograph of her husband, Charles Stephens, shows a deft skill and the kind of staging she often did to create photos on which to base her illustrations.

Charles Stephens Posing

By Alice Barber Stephens, c1900

William Innes Homer papers, MSS 0922, Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Museums & Press, Newark, Delaware

With a law degree and working in his father’s law firm, at the age of 28 C. Yarnall Abbott took up photography. He achieved great success very quickly. By the following year, he was already exhibiting at important national exhibitions, including exhibiting 11 photographs at the 1899-1901 Philadelphia Photographic Salons. In short order, he had a solo exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society in London, and was elected to the Linked Ring, a Pictorialist group in England paralleling the Photo-Secession in New York. In 1904, five years after starting his photographic career, he was elected president of the Philadelphia Photographic Society and was elected to the Photo-Secession, exhibiting many times with them including in Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work and a show at PAFA in 1906. A Pictorialist through and through, he used light, blurring and scratching in producing exquisite photographs, many of them portraits.

Rose

By C. Yarnall Abbott, 1902

Exhibited at a solo exhibition of The Royal Photographic Society in London, 1902

The Photographic Journal, Mar. 31, 1902, p.91

Starting in the 1890’s, Henry Troth had a lengthy career in commercial photography of important homes and buildings in the Philadelphia area. Toward the end of the 1890’s, he photographed a series of beautifully composed botanical specimens, which made their way into scientific articles and books, cementing his reputation as a serious photographer. In 1898, Troth exhibited at the first Philadelphia Photographic Salon, at which Alice Barber Stephens was a juror and exhibitor, and he himself was a juror and exhibitor at the second Salon in 1899. Those Salons helped establish Troth as a Pictorialist, with Alfred Stieglitz inviting him to exhibit at American Pictorial Photography arranged by the Photo-Secession in New York in 1902, along with C. Yarnall Abbott. Over his lifetime, Troth was awarded thirty medals for his exhibits at a lengthy list of exhibitions.

In an article in 1897, Troth defines the look of the best photographs as “somewhat akin to haze and … caused more or less by dampness.”, as accurate a description of Pictorial landscapes as one needs.

August Morning, Crum Creek

By Henry Troth, c1900

Minneapolis Institute of Art

Carl Finkbeiner

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