Early Art Photography

This summer, I’ve been working on a little book project for my History of Photography students. Here is a preview…

Early Art Photography

As photography and methods of printing evolved throughout the 19th century, so did debates about its artistic potential. Could a mechanical process—one that relied on light, optics, and chemistry—also be considered fine art? And if so, how should photographic art distinguish itself from mere documentation? These questions gave rise to passionate movements, rivalries, and competing aesthetic philosophies.

When photography first emerged, many painters and critics saw it as either a threat to the future of painting or a soulless tool of reproduction. Upon seeing a daguerreotype, the French painter Paul Delaroche is famously quoted as saying, “From this day, painting is dead.” 

Charles Baudelaire
By Nadar

Others worried that photography’s accuracy would steer artists away from imaginative or idealized expression. Charles Baudelaire lamented that painters were increasingly surrendering to realism, warning, “Each day the painter becomes more and more given to painting not what he dreams but what he sees.”

Critics like John Ruskin were suspicious of the growing reliance on technology, writing, “Almost the whole system and hope of modern life are founded on the notion that you may substitute mechanism for skill, photography for picture, cast-iron for sculpture.” 

To some, the camera’s mechanical eye could never replace that of a trained artist. As the sculptor Auguste Rodin declared, “If the artist only reproduces superficial features as photography does… he deserves no admiration.”

Painter Rembrandt Peale similarly warned, “We do not see with the eyes only, but with the soul.” Later, photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Minor White would later turn this idea on its head, arguing that a camera in the hands of an artist could indeed reflect something deeper.

“The ingratitude of painting, refusing the smallest place in its exhibition to photography, to whom it owes so much”

The pioneering photographer Nadar emphasized that mastery came not from the machine, but from a refined understanding of light: “What can’t be learned, it’s the sense of light, it’s the artistic appreciation of the effects produced by different and combined qualities of light.” In a satirical 1857 sketch, he illustrated the tension between photography and painting by showing an anthropomorphic painter’s palette literally kicking a camera out of a fine art exhibition.

In the decades that followed, photographers would seek to prove that photography could be more than mechanical—it could be poetic, interpretive, and emotional. Out of this ambition came the first generation of photographic artists.

“Happy Days” — Oscar Rejlander with his wife.

Oscar Rejlander: Father of Art Photography

One of the first to argue for photography’s place among the fine arts was Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1813–1875), a Swedish-born painter turned photographer who spent most of his career in England. Rejlander’s enthusiasm for photography is evident, as his work spanned a remarkable range—from formal portraits and allegorical tableaux to expressive studies of faces and hands, landscapes, comical scenes, and even social commentary.

“The Two Ways of Life” Click to enlarge

His most famous work, The Two Ways of Life (1857), is a monumental combination print made from over 30 separate negatives, painstakingly aligned and blended in the darkroom over six weeks. The image depicts an allegorical scene: a wise patriarch shows two young men the diverging paths of virtue and vice. On one side are images of industry, study, and charity; on the other, gambling, drunkenness, and lust. The work was modeled after Raphael’s fresco The School of Athens, completed in 1511. 

“The School of Athens” Click to enlarge

Rejlander’s work shocked some Victorian viewers for its inclusion of partially nude figures—an audacious move for photography at the time. Despite the controversy, The Two Ways of Life was, for the time, a landmark in technical skill and creative ambition. Queen Victoria herself purchased three copies, but all are lost.

Rejlander wasn’t the first to use combination printing—blending multiple negatives into a single print by masking off unwanted areas—but he demonstrated how photo manipulation could be used to create scenes beyond the bounds of reality, nearly 150 years before Photoshop. 

“Hard Times”

One example of combining negatives was Hard Times (c. 1860), named after Charles Dickens’s novel. The photograph depicts a weary carpenter seated in a small room, slumped forward, staring ahead in apparent despair. He holds a saw in his right hand, suggesting unemployment. Behind him, his wife and child lie asleep, unaware of his burden. Through a double exposure, Rejlander introduces an overlay in which the same man appears again, gently touching his wife’s head while his child kneels beside them in prayer. By blending the two images, Rejlander reveals the man’s anxiety on a spiritual level. In fact, Rejlander labeled it “A Spiritualistic Photo.” The narrative of economic hardship, family responsibility, and emotional strain has a timeless quality.

“First I Lost My Pen and Now I’ve Lost My Spectacles”

But Rejlander also had a sense of humor. In First I Lost My Pen and Now I’ve Lost My Spectacles (c. 1860), an elderly man rummages through a cluttered table, searching for his glasses—which are perched atop his head—while his missing pen sits in his mouth. A woman watches from the background, seemingly debating whether or not to point out the obvious. 

“Poor Jo”

Rejlander made Poor Jo around 1860–1864, another image inspired by the work of Charles Dickens—this time referencing the homeless crossing-sweeper Jo from Bleak House. In Dickens’s novel, Jo is a symbol of society’s neglect of the poor and forgotten. Rejlander’s staged photograph mirrors this sentiment: a young boy sits slumped on a set of stone steps, his head buried in his folded arms. His clothing is tattered, his posture despondent, and the setting spare.

Rejlander’s hybrid practice—part theater, part darkroom craft, part moral philosophy—earned him the informal title “Father of Art Photography.” He laid the groundwork for others, like Henry Peach Robinson.

Henry Peach Robinson

Henry Peach Robinson

Picking up the torch of combination printing was Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901), an English photographer often associated with Pictorialism—even though his work predated the movement’s formal emergence.

Trained as a painter, Robinson applied the principles of academic art—composition, symbolism, and narrative—to his photographs. Similar to Rejlander, he is best known for his combination prints: carefully staged images made by combining multiple negatives into a single, (mostly) seamless final image.

In 1869, Robinson published Pictorial Effect in Photography, in which he laid out his philosophy of photographic composition. Chapters include “Balance,” “Unity,” and “The Composition of the Figure,” reflecting his belief that photography should be guided by the same aesthetic principles as painting. 

In one example, he uses a drawing of a figure reading a book to demonstrate how visual elements can guide the viewer’s eye: leading lines beneath the subject draw attention upward, while the subject’s arm—resting on her jaw—forms a triangle and creates a sense of harmony. Robinson encouraged deliberate, purposeful design, although, as we’ll see, some found it contrived.

However, Robinson also cautioned against rigidly following artistic rules. “I must warn you,” he wrote, “against a too close study of art to the exclusion of nature and the suppression of original thought…. Art rules should be a guide only to the study of nature, and not a set of fetters to confine the ideas or to depress the faculty of original interpretation in the artist, whether he be painter or photographer.”

For Robinson, the purpose of rules was not to limit creativity but to train the artist’s judgment—so that they “may select with ease, and, when he does select, know why one aspect of a subject is better than another.”

“Fading Away” Click to enlarge

Robinson’s 1858 photograph Fading Away is his best-known work. This image portrays a young woman on her deathbed, surrounded by grieving family members—a composition achieved through the combination of five separate negatives. Robinson employed this technique to overcome the technical limitations of the time, allowing for greater control over lighting and composition. 

However, the resulting image presented a lighting scenario that defied natural logic: the interior scene is brightly illuminated from the front, despite the only visible light source being a window at the back, suggesting overcast conditions. When the image was revealed to be a composite at a photographic society meeting, the audience reportedly howled with disapproval, feeling deceived by what they believed to be a truthful record. 

Critics at the time didn’t hold back either, with one remarking, “Look steadily at it a minute… and all reality will ‘fade away’ as the make-up forces itself more and more on the attention.”

Fading Away was both condemned and celebrated. Victorian audiences were unsettled by the fabricated depiction of death, a subject considered too intimate and morbid for staged photography. Yet, the image’s emotional depth and painterly quality garnered admiration, even catching the attention of Queen Victoria, who purchased a copy. Robinson defended his approach by asserting that photographs, like paintings, could be crafted, composed, and tell a story. 

“Little Red Riding Hood” (3 of 4)

As with Fading Away, not all of Robinson’s photographs were convincing. In the third of a four-part series depicting Little Red Riding Hood (1858), a young girl stands at her grandmother’s bedside—now occupied by a (taxidermied) wolf dressed in bedclothes. The effect is more comical than convincing, with the theatrical staging and campy wolf staring directly at the camera, undermining any sense of realism. The image reveals the limits of Robinson’s approach when narrative ambition exceeded both the technical capabilities of the time and the audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief.

“Carolling”

A more nuanced scene is Carolling” from 1887. Two women enjoy a conversation while walking through a misty sheep pasture. The title suggests singing, but there is no overt action—no mouths open in song, no instruments, no dramatic gesture. Instead, Robinson draws on the older, poetic sense of “carolling” as joyful movement through nature, possibly with song but not necessarily depicted. The result is quietly evocative rather than contrived.

“Carolling”

We also have a compositional sketch from Robinson that outlines the entire scene—a glimpse into his planning process. Though his pictorialist aims differ from the “straight” photographers of the 20th century, Robinson’s method reveals what Ansel Adams would later call “pre-visualization”: the ability to conceive an image fully before exposing the plate.

Not everyone was impressed by Robinson’s painterly ambition. By the 1880s, a new generation of photographers began to push back against heavy-handed artifice in favor of naturalism. Chief among them was Peter Henry Emerson, a vocal critic of combination printing and anything he saw as contrived or sentimental.

Upon seeing one of Robinson’s later tableaux, Emerson declared, “This is an inane, flat, vapid piece of work, bigger and more worthless than ever. Its composition is childish and its sentiment puerile.” For Emerson, such images betrayed the medium’s true potential. Rather than imitating painting, he believed photography should embrace its own visual language, rooted in observation, light, and the subtleties of everyday life.

Despite being forced to give up his studio in 1864 due to ill health caused by exposure to photographic chemicals, Robinson remained a central figure in the movement to establish photography as a legitimate art form. Unable to continue darkroom-based combination printing, he turned to a simpler technique: assembling his compositions using scissors and paste, a method that allowed him to plan images without the physical demands of chemical processing. 

The Linked Ring Selecting Committee

In 1892, he helped found The Linked Ring, a breakaway photographic society formed in response to the Royal Photographic Society’s increasing emphasis on technical precision over artistic vision. The Linked Ring, which lasted until 1910, welcomed both British and international members and provided a prestigious platform for pictorialists—those who saw photography as a form of visual poetry, often influenced by painting and literature. 

Peter Henry Emerson

Peter Henry Emerson and the Push for Naturalism

Robinson’s greatest critic was Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936), a British photographer and author who advocated for a different approach: Naturalism. Emerson rejected Robinson’s constructed tableaux as artificial and misleading. Instead, he believed that photography should capture the world as it appears to the eye—without manipulation, darkroom trickery, or theatrical staging (although many of his photos were clearly posed).

“Gathering Water Lilies”

Perhaps one of Emerson’s most effective photographs is Gathering Water Lilies (1886), a clear example of his Naturalist approach. It shows a man and woman in a flat-bottomed boat drifting on a still, reflective waterway. The man sits at the back, holding the oars, while the woman leans forward, reaching toward the water with a lily in her hand. The boat is framed by reeds and overhanging branches, giving the scene a quiet, enclosed feeling. Although the image was staged, it avoids the stiff theatricality of earlier combination prints. The unadorned rural setting reflects his admiration for everyday life, echoing the values of Realist painters, who favored ordinary subjects over grandiose themes.

At Plough, The End Of The Furrow

Another photograph influenced by the Realism movement is At Plough, The End of the Furrow (1887). In the foreground, two horses strain against a plough guided by a solitary farmer, their forms sharply defined against the open field. The scene captures the dignity of rural labor without sentimentality, much like the work of Jean-François Millet. 

The photograph also illustrates one of Emerson’s key visual theories: that a photograph should mimic human vision, with a central area of sharp focus that gradually softens at the edges. This selective focus helped Emerson distinguish his work from the flat, evenly detailed look of earlier photographic styles, reinforcing his belief that photography could offer its own kind of artistic interpretation, rooted in observation rather than manipulation.

To further distinguish his photographic vision, Emerson turned to photogravure, a high-quality intaglio printing process known for its rich tonal range and exceptional detail. The process had its roots in early experiments by William Henry Fox Talbot, who patented a method of photomechanical reproduction in 1852. By the late 1870s, photogravure had been refined—particularly through the work of Czech printer Karel Klíč, who developed the modern version of the technique in 1878, combining photography with traditional etching methods.

“Coming Home From the Marshes”

Unlike albumen or gelatin prints, which could appear glossy or overly smooth, photogravure produced a matte, grainy surface more akin to etchings or charcoal drawings. This suited Emerson’s Naturalist ideals, emphasizing mood and atmosphere without the artificial sheen of commercial prints. He used photogravure extensively in his books, including Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads (1886).

The Death of Naturalistic Photography

As photography struggled to gain acceptance as art, sometimes even leading figures wavered in their convictions. In his black-bordered 1891 publication The Death of Naturalistic Photography, Emerson famously recanted earlier assertions that photography could be art:

“I have… I regret it deeply, compared photographs to great works of art, and photographers to great artists. It was rash and thoughtless, and my punishment is having to acknowledge it now… In short, I throw my lot in with those who say that Photography is a very limited art. I deeply regret that I have come to this conclusion…“ 

Despite this dramatic disavowal, Emerson’s influence endured, particularly in his belief that photographs should reflect the world as seen by the human eye, not manipulated to mimic painting.

The Legacy of the Debate

The debate between Pictorialism and Naturalism shaped the development of photography for decades. In the late 19th century, Pictorialists dominated art salons and exhibitions, promoting photography as a medium capable of personal expression and emotional depth. But for all its ambition, Pictorialism was still a backwards-looking style, often imitating painting in its techniques and subject matter; it was trying to be something it wasn’t. By the early 20th century, Pictorialism gave way to a sharper, more modernist aesthetic, one that embodied some of Peter Henry Emerson’s earlier arguments about clarity, observation, and photography’s unique visual language—instead of trying to copy painting.

Alfred Stieglitz

If Rejlander, Robinson, and Emerson each represented a generation of art photographers, Alfred Stieglitz was the next giant to emerge. The tension between Naturalism and Pictorialism played out in his own work and influence. 

While Stieglitz championed Pictorialism through publications like Camera Notes and Camera Work, his personal photographic style often leaned more toward Naturalism. In fact, early in his career, one of his photographs won first prize in an 1887 competition, judged by none other than Peter Henry Emerson.

Stieglitz battled for photography to be accepted as a fine art.  When museums refused to show photographs alongside paintings, Stieglitz opened his own gallery—the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (also known as “291”)—and exhibited photography beside avant-garde works by Picasso, Rodin, and others. In doing so, he helped secure photography’s place within the world of fine art.