Contrasts

Tonal study exploring dark/light pictorial contrast, published as plate 5 of Camera Work n° 5 (January 1904), reproduced as photogravure from an original gum bichromate print. Camera Work n° 5 was the issue in which Alfred Stieglitz dedicated a six-plate portfolio to Demachy — Struggle, In Brittany, Severity, On the Lake, Contrasts and a sixth figure plate — institutionalising the French pictorialist for the American Photo-Secession three years before their public quarrel of 1907. Contrasts is structural rather than narrative: the title declares the subject, and the image is built as an opposition of pigmentary masses, light dissolved against dark in the manner of a tonalist painting closer to Whistler than to descriptive photography. By 1904 Demachy, co-founder with Maurice Bucquet of the Photo-Club de Paris (first Salon de Paris 1894) and member of the British Linked Ring (1895), was articulating in his writings — soon collected in Procédés d'art en photographie (1906, with Constant Puyo) — the doctrine that photography reached art only through pigmentary intervention, in direct opposition to the documentary tendency of the period. Banker by inheritance and frequenter of the Alphonse Daudet literary circle, he conceived each print as a graphic decision rather than a record. Technically the print is multi-coat gum bichromate, each layer a tinted gum arabic sensitised with potassium bichromate, exposed under the negative and brushed selectively under tepid water. At Maison Picturale, this kind of tonal study is re-transposed in non-toxic gum bichromate following the chemistry reformulated by Vision Picturale, on 640 g/m² cotton paper — the pictorial contrast of the master without the bichromate sensitiser.

Reference file : Robert Demachy, Camera Work n°5, 1904 — Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons