Art Review : Picturing California

“Pictorialism in California: Photographs 1900-1940” is an unprecedented collaboration between two remarkable institutions, San Marino’s Henry E. Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens and Malibu’s J. Paul Getty Museum. The two-part exhibition surveys Southern California pictures at the Huntington and Northern California pictures at the Getty, both concentrating on a type of camera work that retained often controversial prominence for half a century.

Ten years ago, when the Getty Museum established a new curatorial department dedicated to photographs--and underscored the move with the stunning simultaneous acquisition of several of the world’s most important private collections--opinion in the world of photographic study held that the center of scholarship had shifted decisively to the West Coast. With “Pictorialism in California,” that scholarly focus has now turned to the first pivotal era of photographic production on the West Coast.

Don’t expect “Pictorialism in California” to constitute a major shake-up in the conventional approach to its subject. The exhibition includes work by some of the most renowned, obsessively studied photographers of the 20th Century, including Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston. A wholesale revision in our thinking about their work is unlikely.

Rather than attempt a full-scale revision of the history of pictorialist photography on the West Coast, the curators have taken the opportunity to weave together abundant, often errant threads. The show means to synthesize.

For example, it includes a substantial number of photographs--11 in all--by members of the Japanese American camera clubs that were so important, especially in Los Angeles, during the 1920s and 1930s. (The iniquitous internment of Japanese Americans during World War II brought the clubs--and their influence--to an abrupt end.) Dennis Reed, an associate dean at L.A. Valley College and guest curator for the Huntington’s portion of the show, has been instrumental in recent years in salvaging from obscurity many of those photographers--Kaye Shimojima, Shigemi Uyeda and Hiromu Kira chief among them.

Since the early 1980s Reed has overseen two path-breaking exhibitions concerned with Japanese American camera clubs. With the current show, their photographs have finally taken their appropriate place within the larger context of the pictorialist movement.

The pictorialist philosophy had begun in England in the 1880s and by the turn of the century had been championed in New York by Alfred Stieglitz. In San Francisco, the California Camera Club became the largest association of photographers in the nation to espouse pictorialist ideals. Slightly later, the movement spread to Los Angeles and environs.

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Pictorialism is a rather odd amalgam of viewpoints about the use of camera and film as tools with which to make art. Two features stand out.

One is its quasi-scientific aspirations for the camera, which was regarded as a sort of mechanical equivalent to the human eye. Pictorialists often employed softly focused, muted views of natural scenery, or of the gentle or dramatic play of light and shadow across a surface. They were not, however, seeking to capture or reproduce a worldly image of nature.

Instead, what they wanted to create was a picture of the effects nature had on the human heart and soul. The Romantic Era wedded the Scientific Age in pictorialist photography.

The marriage lasted longest in California. In part, the climate was hospitable because the burgeoning commercial titans of Hollywood were busily selling the fruits of that same union to the masses, in the form of moving pictures.

The second peculiarity of pictorialist photography is in fact found within its relationship to the newly evolving culture of the masses, a phenomenon unprecedented in human history. Bluntly put, pictorialism was a reactionary impulse.

Pictorialism grew from a self-conscious urge to make photographs whose style would recall the painterly qualities of 19th-Century art. In his essay in the handsome catalogue accompanying the show, its co-curator, collector Michael G. Wilson, notes that this urge was fueled by a desire to distinguish Photography-as-Art from the rapidly expanding mountain of pictures being churned out by commercial hacks and legions of Kodak-wielding amateurs.

Given the reactionary genesis of photographic pictorialism, the Getty-Huntington collaboration does suggest one noteworthy irony. For in addition to the Japanese American photographers so important in Southern California, women were catalytic in the north. Laura Adams Armer, Adelaide Hanscom, Alma Lavinson, Dorothea Lange, Anne Brigman--fully half the photographs in the Getty portion of the show are by women.

In a cultural milieu largely shaped by the prerogatives of white men, it’s worth considering just who in California took up the camera with passionate dedication. For them, pictorialist photography offered an unburdened, newly possible avenue into art.

* Getty Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, (310) 458-2003, parking reservations required; Huntington Library, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, (818) 405-2141; both closed Mondays.