Christian A. Peterson
After the Photo-Secession
American Pictorial Photography,
1910-1955
The beautiful and seductive images of an overlooked movement, reproduced in their
full tonal range.
Much has been written about Alfred Stieglitz and
his role in establishing photography as an art. Little
attention, however, has been paid to the pictorial
photographers who followed Stieglitz, among them Imo
Jean Cunningham, Edward Weston, Clarence H. White,
and a host of othersthose who, in a widespread
movement, approached photography in a painterly
fashion, creating beautiful images through the use of
careful lighting, manipulated tones, soft focus effects, and
artistic compositions.
In this important volume, Christian A. Peterson
finally gives the pictorialists of the first half of the
twentieth century their due. He describes the
backgrounds of the movement, their methods, the photo clubs
they belonged to, and their work, illustrated here
with ninety-three stunning reproductions. The
movement seemed to die out, Peterson suggests, with the
rising popularity of 35mm photography in mid-century, when
the care and slow working procedures required by
large-format cameras became unpopular.
Christian A. Peterson is associate curator of photography
at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and author of
Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Notes, also from Norton.
1997 / hardcover / ISBN 0-393-04111-5 /
93 full-color photographs / 224 pages / photography/photographic history
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