PHOTOGRAPHS
Watson-Schutze, Eva
U.S. (1867 - 1935)
Portrait of a Young Girl
c. 1905
Platinum print
7 3/4 x 6 1/8 in. (19.7 x 15.6 cm) image size;15 x 12 in. (38.1 x 30.5 cm) mount sheet size
Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection
FA 2007.58

During the nineteenth century, photography was used as a tool by journalists, scientists, and artists, who made photographic pictures as study aids. There were relatively few photographers who advanced their pictures as an end in themselves and received positive critical attention for doing so. As a founding member of the New York Photo-Secession, Eva Watson-Schutze was part of the first major American movement to advance photography as an artistic practice worthy of the same aesthetic consideration as painting and sculpture. The Photo-Secessionists organized in 1902 to share, write about, publish, and exhibit photographs by themselves and others working in the "pictorialist" mode. Meant to approximate the look of paintings and drawings, their photographs depicted subjects familiar from painting--portraits, landscapes, genre scenes, and still lifes--often manipulated by hand to emphasize their painterly qualities. -- Label copy for The Photographic Impulse: A Critical History of Photography, The Joseph and Elaine Monsen Collection, October 12, 2001 to January 6, 2002.