Echa piktorialne w autorskiej twórczości fotograficznej
Pictorial Echoes in Authorial Photography

Author(s): Witold Jacyków
Subject(s): Visual Arts
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: pictorialism; the processing of photographic image; photographic document; photographic creation
Summary/Abstract: While engaging in photography, it is crucial to understand the inextricable relationship between the technical ancestry of this medium and the possibilities of free artistic creation. Photography facilitates accurate documentation of reality, reaching back to the language of the visual arts at the beginning of its existence while at the same time developing its own language of fact, devoid, on principle, of any aestheticization. This early period of photography known as pictorialism lasted from the end of the 19th century until the year 1914. The main feature of pictorial photographs was the interference of the author into the mechanically recorded photographs in order to imbue them with the qualities of unique artistic depictions. In time, such methods were substituted with pure recording to enhance the impact of the particular message. However, the history of social communication reveals certain misuses of manipulation in seemingly objective photographic documents. Thus, it would be possible to posit that interference with the image has been and continues to be present in the history of photography, while digital photography broadens those possibilities even wider. The arguments concerning the purity of the medium are, therefore, not indicative of the objective truth. Perhaps, then, the use of the pictorial method in contemporary photography allows the artists to more fully describe the world from their own subjective point of view.

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