Description
Book SynopsisThis book is an investigation of the widely overlooked photographic style of pictorialism in the American West between 1900 and 1950 and argues that western pictorialist photographers were regionalists that had their roots in the formidable photographic heritage of the nineteenth-century West. Driven by a wealth of textual and visual primary sources, the book addresses the West’s relationship with the eastern centers of art in the early century, the diversity of practitioners such as women, Japanese Americans, Indigenous Americans, western rural workers, etc., and the style’s final demise as it related to the modernism of Group F.64. Couched in the rhetoric of regionalism; it is a refreshing and innovative approach to an overlooked wealth of American cultural production.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Figures Introduction 1 A Brief Introduction to American Pictorialism 2 Stieglitz Abandons Pictorialism 3 Pictorialism in the America West 4 The Broad Movement 5 A Note on the Images 6 Possibilities and Unalloyed Pleasures 1 The Broad Movement 1 The New Woman and the Origins of the Broad Movement 2 Rise of the Hobbyist-Amateur 3 The Photographic/Pictorialist Industry 3.1 Kodak 3.2 Photographic Journals and Publications 3.3 Photographic Technologies, Materials, and Techniques 3.4 National Organizations and Local Camera Clubs 3.5 Salons, Exhibitions, and Conventions and Postal Clubs, Interchanges, and Circulating Societies 4 Pictorialism and the Picturesque 2 Regional Pictorialism in the West 1 Cultural Regionalism 2 Artistic Regionalism 3 Western Pictorialist Photography 3.1 California Pictorialism 3.2 The West beyond California 3.3 Mythic West/“Provincial” West 3.4 Western Women’s Regionalism 3.5 Japonisme and West-Coast Japanese Pictorialists 3.6 Indigenous America 3 The End of Pictorialism 1 The Protracted Decline of Pictorialism 1.1 Embattled Pictorialism: Photography as Fine Art 1.2 Embattled Photography: Pictorialism versus Painting 1.3 Embattled Abroad: American versus European Pictorialism 1.4 Embattled Subject Matter 1.5 Embattled from Within: Internal Pictorialist Rhetoric 2 The Beginning of the End: Group f.64 2.1 Regional Modern 2.2 Attack and Counterattack 2.3 Expanded Photographic Practice: fsa and Social Documentary 2.4 Modernist Regionalism Epilogue 1 Erasing Pictorialism 2 From the Regional to the Global References Index
