Painterly Photographs

By Elizabeth Licata

 This summer, the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University celebrates an early and influential photographer, whose beautiful, atmospheric portraits and landscapes were nonetheless part of a revolution in the infant artform of photography.

Thibaudeau print
Augustus Thibaudeau, Untitled albumin print.
Terms used to describe the work of early photographer Augustus Jackson Thibaudeau (1866-1939) are as murky and mysterious as the images themselves. Known locally as the Photo-Pictorialists, Thibaudeau and his fellow Buffalo-area photographers were also allied to the Photo-Secessionists, led by New York-based photographer Alfred Steiglitz. The mission of the Photo-Secession was to uphold photography’s metaphoric possibilities, and to treat the camera as an interpretive instrument, not just a recorder of fact.

While the softly focused images of the Photo-Pictorialists may seem to look back to nineteenth century painting traditions, in fact they were trying to break free of photography’s dependence on reality and move it into a realm where detail is suppressed to emphasize composition and form. Ironically, as Anthony Bannon states in his history of this group, The Photo-Pictorialists of Buffalo (1981), it was necessary for the Pictorial movement to shake loose the “albatross of fact” in order to make art from a photograph, and thus advance the genre into the realm of twentieth century Modernism.

Thibaudeau, a lawyer, moved to Niagara Falls in 1892 because of the area’s “abundance of electricity.” He began making photographs around the turn of the century, and won medals for his photographs at international expositions in Munich and Budapest.

While living in Niagara Falls (on Buffalo Avenue), he attended the Clarence H. White School of Photography, and was good friends with White as well as with Steiglitz, Adolf de Meyer, Max Weber, Edward Steichen and fellow Pictorialists F. Austen Lidbury and Wilbur Porterfield.

Interestingly, the rhetoric of the Photo-Pictorialist movement seems to look ahead to the digital era, where manipulations of factual images are de rigueur and—occasionally—controversial:

“The modern photographer has it in his power to direct or mold as he wills virtually every stage of the making of a picture. He can supply, correct, or eliminate; he can even introduce color or such combinations of color by means of successive printing...as to produce almost any effect...”

(Alfred Steiglitz, Century Magazine, 10/02, as quoted in The Photo-Pictorialists of Buffalo)

The Photography of Augustus Jackson Thibaudeau runs from July 14 to September 15, 2002, at the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University. There is an opening reception on Sunday, July 14, 2-4 p.m., featuring a lecture by Anthony Bannon, Director, The International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House.


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