From the Photo-secession to Commercialism
From 1913 to 1917, Karl F. Struss, the last photographer to join the Photo-secession, took pictures of interiors and model railroads for Harper’s Bazaar. He was among the first to promote photography as a commercial medium. In 1914, an unidentified author wrote:
The facility of its reproduction, the economic advantage it affords over other arts, its adaptability to personal expression, and its universal and understandable appeal are implements the intelligent users of the camera should employ in helping photography take its place in the world of illustrative art. For the illustration of stories and poems, there is no reason on earth why a photograph should not be desirable to a publisher.
[emphasis mine, from “Spheres of Usefulness,” Platinum Print May 1914, p.10]
By the end of the decade, there was a significant increase in the use of soft-focus photographs in advertising, pointing to the influence of the pictorialists. The world of commercial culture, disdained by Steiglitz, was nonetheless influenced by his circle. The rise in advertising over the course of the roaring twenties was also marked by an interest in using photographs to appeal to the public. Leonard A. Williams Illustrative Photography in Advertising was published in 1929. Williams stressed unity, with the logic of a modern day Aristotle:
Every writer of advertisements or short stories lives up to the rule— Have a single character, a single event, and a single emotion. Now, the illustrator, or pictorial publicity photographer, must have rules similar to the writer. His rule is— Every picture must have a border around the frame; within that frame a center of interest must be placed at what is known as the aesthetic center or A.C. point. Some call it the talking point.
Soft-focus commercial portraiture grew across the depression. The tension between the soft-focus work of pictorialists and the hard edges of modernism was strong. The industrial subject matter favored by modernists dovetailed with the emotional emphasis favored by pictorialists in the commercial universe of advertising. In 1933, the first Detroit International Salon of Industrial photography was held at the same time and in the same building as the cities second pictorial salon, drawing over 30,000 visitors. Leading pictorial photographers began to endorse photographic products around this time as well.
This material, abstracted from After the Photo-secession by Christian Peterson, provides an interesting subtext to the development of documentary photography during the same time period. The borderline between commerce and art seems to be much lower in the case of so called “artistic” photographers. No wonder so many people like Walker Evans felt the need to rebel against the theories flying around this age.
