Tate Modern
£20
Photography turns 200 this year. The earliest surviving photograph, ‘View from the Window at Le Gras’, is thought to have been taken by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826, making 2026 the bicentenary of a medium that has been called both an art and a science. So it’s as good a time as any to look back on photography’s early years.
Light and Magic, the new show at Tate Modern, starts in the 1880s - more than half a century after Niépce’s heliograph. Yet photography was still in its infancy. The exhibition is subtitled The Birth of Art Photography, but its subject is pictorialism, an expressive, often vaguely defined, style of photography that emerged in the late 19th century as a deliberate attempt to position photography not as an instrument of observation, as it had been thought of up until this point, but as an art in and of itself.
Early on in the exhibition, we’re introduced to Emma Barton’s photographs, which are essentially staged scenes comparable to those painted by the Pre-Raphaelites. Other artists, like the French photographer Robert Demachy, went further, manipulating their prints by hand until the resulting images no longer looked like photographs at all. Demachy’s pictures of ballerinas appear as though they were drawn in charcoal.
It wants us to broaden our understanding of photography
Light and Magic wants us to broaden our understanding of photography, both in its definition and its history. The curators have collected a broad body of work to show the range of early art photography. But the problem with such a broad term is that its boundaries can easily blur. The final room of the exhibition states that pictorialism did not end with modernism; rather the ‘two movements remained intertwined’ and that entwinement is exemplified, in canonical photographs from Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and Edward Steichen. Exciting works, but their inclusion only emphasises the feeling that the terms of pictorialism are porous.
Where the exhibition does provide clarity is on the printing process. A corridor connecting the two halves of the exhibition explains the various ways photographers developed and printed their images throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Towards the end of Light and Magic, the curators have also installed a functioning darkroom, and the gallery will be hosting a series of workshops where visitors can learn more about developing and printing. Those interested in analogue photography will no doubt enjoy this latest offering from Tate.
This is also a very global show. Viewers can enjoy Iwata Nakayama’s poetic photomontages from Japan, Cheong Fun Yip’s dramatic shots of Singapore, and Robert Marconato’s high-contrast visions from Brazil. The geographical range is welcome, but at times this cosmopolitanism further confuses what pictorialism actually was. A later room dedicated to international photo clubs tells us that such groups ‘fostered distinctly local artistic identities’ while claiming that such diverse styles were all part of ‘the pictorialist legacy.’ The photographs, for the most part, are compelling; the connection between them, less so.
It’s fitting that Light and Magic should come not only at photography’s 200th anniversary but at a time when we are once again debating the limits of what counts as a photograph. Is a screenshot a photograph? What about a ‘live’ iPhone picture, which captures several seconds around a single moment? And where, dare I ask, do AI-generated images fit in all this? The exhibition stops at the 1960s, before the ruptures of commercial colour, digital technology and AI transformed the medium. But it is strongest as a provocation to consider what counts as photography. Two hundred years after its invention, we're still arguing about this. Light and Magic arrives at a perfect time in this debate, even if it leaves us with more questions than answers.
