This exhibition reimagines Pictorialism, the late-19th-century photographic movement rooted in “suggestion and mystery,” which sought to establish photography as a fine art through painterly techniques. Early Pictorialists manipulated negatives, blurred focus, and employed labor-intensive methods to create singular, evocative images, distancing photography from its documentary origins.

In this exhibition, Spencer Rowell's stereographs, alongside other Neo-Pictorialists Joy Gregory, Susan Derges, Takashi Arai, Ian Philips-Maclaren and David George revive these process-led techniques, employing analog methods. These approaches are often blended with modern digital tools, creating works that embrace mystery, uncertainty, and emotional resonance.

In a world overwhelmed by billions of digital images, Neo- Pictorialism offers a response, reclaiming the photograph as a crafted, physical artefact. This movement reflects a renewed focus on process, emotional engagement, and storytelling, offering a counterpoint to the throwaway nature of modern photography while addressing the dilemmas and complexities of the 21st century.

Neo-Pictorialism: A New Photographic Movement

By Spencer Rowell, 2020.

Neo-Pictorialism emerges as a reaction to photography’s historical obsession with surface and technical precision, which often constrained its deeper potential for emotional and philosophical inquiry. While photography captivated early audiences with its ability to replicate reality with astonishing clarity, this very strength risked reducing it to mere representation—a passive, surface-level medium. Unlike painting, which explored imagination and internal worlds, photography’s pursuit of technical mastery threatened to overlook the unseen and intangible.

The Pictorialists resisted this reductive approach by embracing traditional, time-intensive methods and welcoming imperfections. For them, photography was not just a scientific process but an artistic one, capable of transcending its mechanical origins to evoke emotion and reveal what lies beneath the surface. Their work sought to move beyond realism, inviting imagination and subjective interpretation into the medium.

Neo-Pictorialism builds on these ideals, challenging the viewer to see beyond the immediate, literal image and encouraging a dialogue between photographer, subject, and audience. Through the interplay of latency—what is present but not yet revealed—and the deliberate re-imagining of narratives, Neo- Pictorialism reclaims photography as a space for emotional depth and introspection.

This movement draws heavily on the interplay between documentation and art, exploring themes of memory, perception, and the unseen narratives hidden in photographs. It questions the reliability of photography as a document, proposing instead that its power lies in its ability to offer alternative perspectives—new truths and emotional connections through layered, constructed storytelling.

At its heart, Neo-Pictorialism is an exploration of photography as an embodied process, where the surface becomes a portal to deeper dimensions of thought, emotion, and imagination. It transforms the two-dimensional image into a three-dimensional emotional experience, bridging the gap between what is visible and what can only be felt or imagined. Through this movement, photography regains its place as a form of art capable of profound inquiry and evocative expression.