Photo-Secession

The Photo-Secession was an early 20th century movement that promoted photography as a fine art in general and photographic pictorialism in particular. A group of photographers, led by Alfred Stieglitz and F. Holland Day in the early 20th century, held the then controversial viewpoint that what was significant about a photograph was not what was in front of the camera but the manipulation of the image by the artist/photographer to achieve his or her subjective vision. The movement helped to raise standards and awareness of art photography. The group is the American counterpart to the Linked Ring, an invitation-only British group which seceded from the Royal Photographic Society.

The group was formed in 1902 after Stieglitz was asked by the National Arts Club to put together an exhibition of the best in contemporary American photography. While organizing the show, Stieglitz had a disagreement with some of the more conservative members of the Club about which photographers should be included. To strengthen his position, Stieglitz rapidly formed an invitation-only group, which he called the Photo-Secession, to give the impression that his views were backed by many other prominent photographers. Although he later claimed that he had “enlisted the aid of the then newly organized and limited ‘Photo-Secession’," in fact there was no such group until he formed it on February 17, 1902, just two weeks before the show at the National Arts Club was scheduled to open.

In naming the group, Stieglitz is thought to have been influenced by the 1898 Munich Secession Exhibition (Verglag des Vereines Bildender Kunstler Muchnes "Sezession"). Stieglitz corresponded frequently with Fritz Matthies-Masuren, who wrote an essay in the catalog for the Munich exhibition, and he was captivated by the thought of photographers defining their own art form. In 1899 he wrote:

Later in his life, Stieglitz gave this account about the origins of the Photo-Secession:

Cultural historian Jay Bochner points out that it is important to look at the Photo-Secession for more than visual aesthetics:

Proponents of Pictorialism, which was the underlying value of the Photo-Secession, argued that photography needed to emulate the painting and etching of the time. Pictorialists believed that, just as a painting is distinctive because of the artist’s manipulation of the materials to achieve an effect, so too should the photographer alter or manipulate the photographic image. Among the methods used were soft focus; special filters and lens coatings; burning, dodging and/or cropping in the darkroom to edit the content of the image; and alternative printing processes such as sepia toning, carbon printing, platinum printing or gum bichromate processing.

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