Themes > Nineteenth Century

Nineteenth Century

In their quest to legitimate photography as a fine art, Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession searched its short history for artistic ancestors. Yet they deemed only two nineteenth-century photographers worthy of being called true artists: David Octavius Hill (whose partner, Robert Adamson, went unacknowledged at the time) and Julia Margaret Cameron. Works by these photographers were the only non-contemporary examples in in Stieglitz’s collection.

 

The Photo-Secessionists admired the work of Hill and Adamson for its composition, in which masses of form are emphasized over line, and praised Cameron’s portraits for subsuming surface detail to emotional intensity. Although these artists were deceased by the turn of the century, their reputations were revived in part by people from Stieglitz’s circle: James Craig Annan made new photogravures from Hill and Adamson’s original paper negatives for publication and exhibition, Frederick H. Evans favorably reviewed Cameron’s work in London, and photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn included works from both oeuvres in a 1915 exhibition titled The Old Masters of Photography.

 

Stieglitz also played a significant role in this retrieval of a photographic past. He featured the work of Hill and Adamson (in 1905, 1909, and 1912) and Cameron (in 1913) in Camera Work—the only nineteenth-century artists to be included in those pages. He also exhibited Hill and Adamson’s prints at 291 and later in the comprehensive International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography he organized at the Albright Art Gallery in 1910, where their work was shown in higher numbers than that of any living photographer.

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Julia Margaret Cameron

Sir John Herschel, 1867, printed 1875

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David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson

[The] Revd Mr [Thomas Henshaw] Jones, 1843/46

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David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson

Dr. Chalmers, 1843/46, printed 1890/1900

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David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson

Lord Cockburn at Bonaly, 1846/47

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David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson

Portrait of Mrs. Rigby, 1844

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AIC_1949-683_T
David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson

Sir John McNeill, 1845, printed 1890/1900

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AIC_1949-684_T
David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson

Portrait of James Nasmyth, c. 1844, printed 1890/1900

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AIC_1949-685_T
David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson

Portrait of Two Men (John Henning and Alexander Handyside Ritchie), c. 1845, printed 1890/1900

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David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson

Lord Robertson, 1843/46, printed 1890/1900

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AIC_1949-687_T
David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson

Mrs. Anna Brownell Jameson, 1844

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AIC_1949-875_T
Julia Margaret Cameron

Robert Browning, 1865, printed 1875

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AIC_1949-876_T
Julia Margaret Cameron

Robert Browning, 1865, printed 1875

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Julia Margaret Cameron

Thomas Carlyle, 1867, printed 1875

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AIC_1949-879_T
Julia Margaret Cameron

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1869, printed 1875

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AIC_1949-880_T
Julia Margaret Cameron

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1868, printed 1875

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aic_1949-881_t
Julia Margaret Cameron

Charles Darwin, c. 1868, printed 1875

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Julia Margaret Cameron

Herr Joseph Joachim, 1868, printed 1875

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AIC_1949-883_T
Julia Margaret Cameron

Sir John Herschel, 1867, printed 1875

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