More and more I find myself looking at old photographs (or rather digital images thereof) on the internet. I generally find these images more satisfying than modern photographs, I think because of their imprecision and blur, and their painterly quality – by which I mean, the sense they give that have been 'painted with light', that they are conscious creations, they are not just passively reflecting back an accurate image of external reality. And they can be painterly in a more literal sense too. Yesterday I came across this arresting autochrome photograph from 1915, by the Austrian-German photographic pioneer Heinrich Kühn...
Something about it – the coloration, the steep perspective, the bisecting shadow – reminded me of this painting by Felix Vallotton, The Ball...Still more painterly, in the sense of looking like a painting, is this autochrome photograph of Kühn's...
And here is another wonderfully soft-toned, soft-outlined Kühn photograph –
Kühn, I gather, used the gum bichromate process, which allowed for a lot of creative manipulation and adjustment, and he was consciously trying to make photographs that resembled other kinds of art prints. He and his artistic colleagues wanted to make stylised photographs as an element of the gesamtknustwerk, the 'ideal work of art' that the Viennese Secessionists aimed to create. Well, he certainly made some very beautiful pictures.
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