Pictorialist Photographers Crash the Art World's Closed Doors

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art has opened "Stage Craft: Pictorialist Photography and Performance," an exhibition of mostly early 20th-century photography on view through January 31, 2027, in the museum's upstairs media-photography gallery.

The show has two curatorial agendas, according to the museum's presentation. It draws back the curtain on SBMA's considerable permanent collection, long endowed with a strong photography component, and it surveys pictorialist photographers who sought a seat at the elite art world's table — a club that had not yet granted photography its aura of artistic respectability.

SBMA has bestowed that respect for decades, through numerous significant photography exhibitions and a well-fortified in-house photography collection. Most of the work on view lives in the museum's own holdings; some pieces arrived on loan, and one was driven over from UCSB's AD&A Museum.

How did the pictorialists argue their case?

They borrowed painting's tricks. The photographers of the medium's seminal phase deployed theatrical devices and new approaches to photo finish, pushing past the idea of photography as a crisp chronicler of reality. The exhibition divides its argument into four sections: Tableaux, Portraits, Environments, and a side gallery titled Stage and Screen.

In Tableaux, Emile V. Clarkson's "Spinning" closely echoes Vermeer's window-lit "The Milkmaid." John E. Dumont's "Hailing the Ferry" nods to Daniel Ridgway Knight's 1888 painting of the same name, with its attention to working-class subjects.

Portraits offers reinvention of existing conventions:

• Imogen Cunningham's "Edward and Margrethe (Weston and Mather)" — a lean close-up two-shot, minimalist in pose and background, each subject peering off in a separate direction, with unstated drama humming underneath.
• Marie de Lautour's untitled 1935 self-portrait — the British pictorialist semi-reclines, lighting a long-stemmed pipe, a symbol of liberation from the male attitudes of her day.
• Florence Kemmler's "The Cameraman" — an oblique study of light and shadow, and visual punning, taking in her photographer husband at his tripod.

What does the show change for how we read these photographers?

The Environments section answers with cityscapes. Hisao E. Kimura, a Los Angeles photographer by way of Japan, admired the found geometry of L.A.'s Japantown in the 1930 image "To the Roof Garden," which shows a child enmeshed in a stairwell's diagonal mesh. Karl Struss framed the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower through bordering windows in a 1909 study — an artistic valentine to the then-towering building. Edward Steichen's 1904 image of the Flatiron, in foggy focus and seen through tree branches, romanticizes another New York landmark.

The Stage and Screen room carries a local angle. Carolyn and Edwin Gledhill, who lived and worked in Santa Barbara in the early 20th century, photographed a 1921 production of Pelleas et Mellisande at the old Potter Theatre, at the corner of State and Montecito streets — a building destroyed by the 1925 earthquake.

Dorothea Lange appears in a very different light from her Depression-era WPA work: her 1921 images of a dancer in mid-motion are soft-focus and elliptically cropped.

Hollywood's presence is undeniable. Ruth Harriet Louise, chief photographer for MGM, is represented by a shot of Renee Adoree. William Mortensen, a prop designer and set photographer for Cecil B. DeMille, pursued the macabre in "The Tribunal," a surreal composite suggesting religious torture and retaliation against a presumed — and nude — "witch." Fred Archer, who helped found the influential Los Angeles Camera Club, fed the exotic Egypto-kitsch fad of the 1920s with "Prayer to Isis."

Struss returns as cinematographer and assistant director for DeMille, with a soft-focus shot of a faux Buddhist temple movie set, taken on his own time and driven by artistic impulse rather than a Hollywood paycheck. In fall 2026, SBMA will give him a museum spotlight of his own — a promise of attention long deferred, though the museum has yet to detail its scope.