Cigarette Girl — A Poster Design

Genre portrait of a young woman smoking, conceived as a poster design — a modern Belle Époque subject treated in the pigmentary vocabulary of pictorialism. Published as a plate of Camera Notes vol. 6 n° 1 (July 1902), Alfred Stieglitz's pre-Camera Work journal of the Photo-Secession. By 1902 Demachy was the most influential pictorialist in continental Europe — co-founder with Maurice Bucquet of the Photo-Club de Paris (whose first Salon de Paris had opened in 1894), elected to the British Linked Ring in 1895, and a regular literary contributor whose proximity to the Alphonse Daudet circle anchored his photography in the salon culture of Paris. The poster format is significant: it places photography in dialogue with the lithographic affiche of Toulouse-Lautrec and Chéret, asserting that the gum bichromate print could do, in pigment and manual labour, what the chromolithographic press did mechanically. The smoking female figure is itself a Belle Époque emblem — by 1902 the cigarette had become an iconographic signal of the modern woman, treated by Manet, Degas and the affichistes — and Demachy reclaims it for pictorial photography. Technically the print is gum bichromate: gum arabic charged with watercolour pigment, sensitised with potassium bichromate, exposed under the negative and brushed selectively under tepid water — the figure of the smoking woman is sculpted into matter, the cigarette smoke modelled as a pigmentary cloud rather than captured by the lens. At Maison Picturale, this kind of Belle Époque genre piece is re-transposed in non-toxic gum bichromate following the chemistry reformulated by Vision Picturale, on 640 g/m² cotton paper — the master's pigment, without the bichromate hazard.

Reference file : Robert Demachy, Camera Notes 1902 — Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons