Pictorialist Photography

The Flatiron, 1904 Edward J. Steichen (American, born Luxembourg, 1879–1973) Gum bichromate over platinum print via

I originally set out to create set out to create a subtle tint in order to emulate the likes of Edward J. Steichen whose photos almost look like paintings. I with obscuring pies of plastic that let very little light through. Once I started experimenting I found that the most interesting pictures were ones with bright light sources directly behind then.

Some of my first pictures where of the sun and the sky but later a found that you can also get a cool effect by simply having one source of light in a dark room. I started becoming interested in the rectangle produced by a blind or a door in a dark room. The darker room also means that the camera will have use a longer exposure which can be taken advantage of by slightly shifting the camera while taking a photo, this creates an interesting blurring effect. The longer exposure can be taken advantage of in another way to, while the photo is being taken I tried spending half a second using one filter and the other half using another filter. None of the photos I took using this strategy where particularly interesting but you can distinctly see the effects of both filters in a few of them, so I think with more experimentation it could produce a very cool effect.

I feel that although I set out to emulate pastoralist photography there was a big disconnect between my photos and pictorealist ones. I feel I became caught up just in how the filters could be used with simple lighting rather than how they could be used to enhance photography, particularly urban photography. The filters where so extreme they draw your attention to the foreground living very little attention left for the composition of the picture. It was a theme of extremes, the filters started out extreme and demanded an extreme background in order to make them interesting.