Although I’ve never really been a great fan of pictorialism, the attempt by photographers around the end of the nineteenth century to establish photography as an artistic medium by showing that they could produce effects using photography that in some respects mirrored the work of artists using other media, there are many pictorialist images that I find highly satisfying.
We may not want to follow their example, with the use of processes such as bromoil, gum bichromate and the like, though I did at one time produce images in most of them, not because I really wanted to use them for my own work, but that I felt making images using them was the only way to truly understand the work of this period. And there was some processes that did have something to offer, notably platinum printing and carbon printing.
If you’ve seen the architectural images of Frederick Evans you will understand what attracted me about that process – and I felt very honoured that one of my platinum prints was exhibited next to one of his in a show to celebrate 150 years of photography in 1989. And some of the most beautiful prints I know in any medium are carbon prints, and if I had a larger studio in which to make my own carbon tissues and prints I might well have made portfolios in that medium.
Fortunately I was saved from this time-consuming labour by the coming of the inkjet and Peizography, a system of printing using carbon-based inks which enabled me to get images with very similar qualities on matt papers to platinum prints. And while nothing else can quite attain the luminosity of the best carbon prints, prints on fine silver materials such as the long discontinued Agfa Record Rapid and Portriga ran it close enough to satisfy – and similar qualities can now be achieved with inkjet prints.
What got me thinking about this was a feature in Dangerous Minds,
The astonishingly beautiful three color photography of Bernard Eilers. Eilers (1878-1951) was a consummate technician and a Duthc pictorialist whose most famous image was probably an atmospheric view of Trafalgar Square in the rain.
You can see a fine collection of his work from the Stadsarchief Amsterdam on line, including the images produced using his tri-color foto-chroma eilers process featured on Dangerous Minds.
Probably a better way to get an appreciation of them is to watch a video using his images of Venice, taken in the 1930s. Where I think the article in DM is misleading is to suggest that he was in some way a pioneer of colour photography, someone whose work might have led to his process being as well known as those of Agfa and Kodak.
Three colour separation processes essentially the same as he used were invented ten years before he was born, although they only became really practical with the invention of panchromatic films in 1903. It was only two years later that Schinzel introduced the first integral tripacks, combining the three layers of emulsion which were the precursors of later colour processes.
Eilers does not even rate a mention in the classic and encyclopedic History of Color Photography by J S Friedman (first published in 1944, but with a revised and updated edition in 1968.) But he does appear, and rightly so, in In Atmospheric Light : Pictorialism in Dutch Photography 1890 – 1925.