cshimokita[Photo Forum Moderator]
10714
"The sky is the key to the landscape" — Léonard Misonne (1870-1943)
Jun 09, 2019,05:55 AM
Here are some photos by Belgian photographer Léonard Misonne trained as an engineer before discovering photography. Raised in Gilly, Belgium, his subject was mostly landscape and people of Europe in the "pictorialist" style.
Pictorialism is a style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography from approximately 1885 to 1915. It refers to a style (typically lacking a sharp focus) in which the photographer has manipulated a straightforward photograph as a means of "creating" an image rather than simply recording it...
Misonne developed and used a process called "Mediobrome", a variant of bromoil when printing his images. It's a process of adding painter's ink to a photograph to darken the highlights and shadows in proportion to the amount of silver in a wet print. The photograph is printed normally, rubbed with linseed oil, before being rubbed with a mixture of paint & artist's turpentine to effect... below are a few examples.
Alfred Stieglitz stated it this way: "Atmosphere is the medium through which we see all things. In order, therefore, to see them in their true value on a photograph, as we do in Nature, atmosphere must be there. Atmosphere softens all lines; it graduates the transition from light to shade; it is essential to the reproduction of the sense of distance. That dimness of outline which is characteristic for distant objects is due to atmosphere. Now, what atmosphere is to Nature, tone is to a picture."
I good friend recently introduced me to Misonne and I really like his style of printing.
Casey
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Photo Credit
Léonard Misonne