Tate Modern Rewrites Pictorialism as a Transcontinental Story

Tate Modern's new exhibition Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography, open until 21 February 2027, retells the history of pictorialism as a transcontinental movement — and argues that south-east and south Asia belong at its centre.

The show opens with a 1927 photograph by Liu Bannong, taken after the Chinese photographer returned from studying linguistics in Paris. White ducks merge with rushing water; shadowy trees loom like dark mountains. Until now, the exhibition's curators say, pictorialism's impact on image-making in south-east and south Asia has remained relatively unknown. This show fills the gap.

The stakes are larger than a correction of the record. Pictorialism was the first concerted move to claim photography as an art form, and its afterlife runs straight into the present.

Where did pictorialism begin?

The English photographer Henry Peach Robinson theorised it. His 1869 instructional book Pictorial Effect in Photography urged image-makers to follow the order and composition of painting rather than simply document reality.

Bannong absorbed those ideas in Paris and produced a text of his own, Bannong tanying ('Bannong's Comments on Photography'), which drew on the aesthetic discourse of traditional Chinese painting. It argued for photography as an expressive medium revealing an inner world of emotion. Long Chin-San continued the dialogue. His essay Photography and Chinese Painting (1955) advised 'choosing' the good parts of a photograph, emulating the approach of traditional Chinese art.

How did Asian photographers practise it?

The exhibition traces several distinct strategies:

• Layered negatives. Singaporean Lee Sow Lim layered photo negatives to build a single image, transferring the ethereal quality of Chinese ink painting into photography — and stamped the results with a traditional painterly red seal.
• Colour abstraction and saturation. Sow Lim's later works became abstractions in colour; Tan Lip Seng stayed figurative but worked with layers of high-contrast, highly saturated colour transparencies.
• Naturalism. Not all pictorialists manipulated images. British writer and photographer PH Emerson controlled light and composition instead; Singaporean Yip Cheong Fun did the same in portraits of fishermen and children.

None of this happened in isolation. It unfolded in photo clubs and salons that kept pictorialism alive long after modernist photography had taken over the West. Many clubs began as forums for colonial officials and local amateurs, gathering information for British administrators — the Photographic Societies of Bombay (1854) and Bengal (1856) conducted ethnographic studies.

Charmaine Toh, senior curator of international art (photography) at the Tate and curator of the show, notes the shift: "these clubs started at a time when most of south-east Asia was on the verge of independence." Pictorialism, for many, offered a deviation from the surveying colonial gaze — and, through salon journals and open calls, a route to worldwide exhibition.

What does the show say about colonialism?

Independence-era photographers set up their own societies: the Photographic Society of India (1937), co-founded by mill-worker Dhirajlal R Mody, and the Photographic Society of Ceylon (1935), founded by Sri Lankan photographer Lionel Wendt.

Wendt's 1930s and early-1940s portraits of the male body introduced fluidity and homoeroticism, depicting men far beyond their castes and professions — a departure from buttoned-up ethnographic representation. Toh cautions against easy conclusions: the body was still performing in Wendt's work, re-rehearsing privileged stereotypes.

Her caveat extends further. "Some photographers would continue using colonial 'tropes', like photographing someone in a sarong in Malaysia, to get accepted into exhibitions overseas," she explains. "It was a certain agency as they played up to Western expectations and then won awards at international salons."

Pictorialism also changed the language of ethnographic photography elsewhere, as in Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari's images of refugees in Attica in the mid-1920s.

How was the history recovered?

Wendt sent his works to London and Paris; even so, his images and those by others have not been included in the history of pictorialism until now. Toh's research was archival labour. "Piecing together this history is on-ground work and opening boxes," she says, describing meetings with photographers' families to find long-lost archives and prints.

The Royal Photographic Society Collection proved decisive. "These photographers would send their prints to London for the RPS annual exhibition — and didn't ask for them back," she says. "Behind these prints is an entire history of where it has travelled to, even between countries who weren't getting along diplomatically."

What does this change for photography today?

Toh's answer is direct: "Contemporary photographic art is where it is today due to the efforts by pictorialists to carve out a space for photography within fine art." Today's debates about the ideology of the photographic gaze, and about the medium itself, owe these predecessors more than the standard histories admit.

Whether a single London exhibition can permanently redraw that canon is the open question. It runs for more than a year; the argument now has a venue.

Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography is at Tate Modern, London, until 21 February 2027.

By Tom Whitfield