Collectors Item du Jour (Vol. VI)

It would take most people a moment to figure out that these aren’t charcoal sketches by Degas or some other impressionist artist. They are in fact photographs from the late 19th century, artfully manipulated to look like paintings. They were made at a time when it hadn’t yet occurred to most of the world that photography could be used to “create” an image rather than simply record it. We’ve touched very briefly on the Pictorialism movement before, when we met Anne Brigman, “the woman who invented the advanced selfie over a century ago”. Today, we’re diving into this curious pre-Photoshop aesthetic of photo manipulation that helped photography find its place as a true art form…

When Kodak introduced the first handheld camera in 1888 with the slogan “You press the button, we do the rest,” photography suddenly became one of the biggest fads in the world.