Pictorial Photographers of America. Photo-Graphic Art 1916

Pictorial Photographers of America, 1916. — 20 p.Representing photography and other graphic arts. The official organ of the Pictorial Photographers of America.By the end of World War I, Stieglitz and Steichen were shedding Pictorial photography’s painterly facade in order to promote an unvarnished display of the medium’s natural strength — namely, its capacity for producing a truthful rendering of abstract form and tonal variation in the real world. This new chapter in each of these artists’ styles was a step toward the international phenomenon of modernism in art, and both would mine that vein to make some of their best work. Stieglitz dissolved the Photo-Secession and Camera Work in 1917, but Käsebier, Coburn, and White continued to make photographs as they had in the early years of the century and became founders of an organization called the Pictorial Photographers of America in 1916.Although the Photo-Secession members eventually went their separate ways, all of them were instrumental in establishing photography’s expressive potential and demonstrating that its value lay beyond reproducing the outlines of the world around us. Pictorialist works were as beautifully rendered as any painter’s canvas and as skillfully constructed as any graphic artist’s composition. In manipulating the presentation of information in a photographic negative, the Pictorialists injected their own sensibility into our perception of the image — thereby imbuing it with pictorial meaning.