Look Again: Robert Demachy

“Do not say that Nature being beautiful and photography being able to reproduce its beauty; therefore photography is Art.  This is unsound.  Nature is often beautiful, of course, but never artistic ‘per se’, for there can be not art without the intervention of the artist in the making of the picture.  Nature is but a theme for the artist to play upon.   Straight photography registers the theme, that is all – and between ourselves, registers it indifferently.”   - Robert Demachy in Camera Work 17 (April 1907):

He detested amateur photography and wrote tirelessly to explicate the artistic dimensions of professional photography at a time when the new medium was  yet undefined.

 

                           A pioneer of French pictorialism, Robert Demachy  (1859-1936)  created unusual effects using  the gum bichromate process invented by his countryman  Alphonse Poitevin in 1855.   In his photographs, Demachy achieved things that  had previously been  seen only  in etching sor watercolors. And he did it before the invention of sophisticated lenses and  other accouterments we now take for granted.  By scratchings and erasures on his plate negatives, Demachy's manipulated backgrounds  enhanced the the grace and stature of his subjects, creating  a satisfying compositional whole. 

Among many Demachy photographs, In Brittany appeared Camera Work (Issue 5 - 1904).  Although the young woman's face is visible only in profile and she is obviously posed carefully, the photographer captures a strong sense of individuality, something he did well.    

        

I think that Speed, often reproduced, was an especially heartfelt image.  Demachy was one of the first Frenchmen to  own an automobile, circa 1890, at a time when they were still experiments in motion, being both expensive and dangerous.  Severity, on the other hand,  is an homage to a new style in painting - Symbolism.    

Demachy's nudes (see Struggle, again from Camera Work 5, for instance) have become known as much for their subject matter as for their place in his work.  I was especially interested to find the portfolio of  sixteen rare prints at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.  Madeleine and Miss S. deserve to be much better known.  Robert Demachy had much to say and his photographs still do, a century after he first made points that are still being debated today. 

Images:

1. En Bretagne, 1904, camera Work 5.

2. Miss S., undated, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

3. Madeleine,  undated, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

4. Speed, July 1904, Camera Work.          

5. Severity,   January 1904, Camera Work.  

6. Woman in a Boater Hat, 1899, Mediatheque, Paris.

7. Hedgerow Under the Snow, 1907, Boston Museum of Fine Arts.