"Winter Fog"

monochrome carbro print on cardboard

signed (pencil) on mount recto; label on mount verso

With this picture, the relatively unknown photographer Floyd Butler Evans created a wonderful example of pictorialism, a style of photography that had its heyday at the end of the 19th century until the First World War.
The aim of the style was not to create a mere image of a moment in reality, but to achieve a symbolic representation of states of mind. The aim was to establish pictorialism and thus photography in general as a fully-fledged means of artistic expression. Stylistically, it was initially oriented in particular to naturalism in painting. The discussion as to whether photography was or could ever become an art had occupied art theorists since the invention of photography. While the then new medium for portraits and reportage quickly gained acceptance, its artistic application remained rare. The main argument against photography as an art form was that photography was a technical process in which the photographer merely had to press the shutter release. Photography was therefore only a copy of nature, while true art had to be a processing. From the wealth of colors and forms offered by nature, the visual artist had to select in order to make the intended statement. This selection should be achieved with the stylistic means of pictorialism in photography as well.
(Christoph Fuchs)