Page 49 - Studio International - July August 1975

Holmes revived the pictorial
strategy of the Camden Town artists
and found beauty in urban settings. The
streets, the suburbs and workplaces were
transformed according to a highly
schematic style in painting; the British
urban setting was clarified through a
pictorial code drawn from the post-
impressionism of Gauguin and Van
Gogh. In the case of Ginner the
additive modular depiction of the urban
world functioned as a pictorial equivalent
to both the cell-like structure of urban
organization and to its modular forms.
Although Ginner, painting before the
First War, distanced and domesticated
the city, he also succeeded in reflecting its
organization. Benington, whose work
precedes that of the Camden Town
painters, implied in his choice of subject
matter a view of the city as an
organized complex; but working in the
shadow of painting as the senior
practice, remained bound by the
pictorial conventions of his time. Where
Ginner transcended his models,
Benington reproduced them in
photography, giving the pictorial
overlay of a painter such as Le Sidaner
to the city subjects associated with
vanguard practice.
Photographers shared the pictorial
rhetoric of this sort of painting.
Photographic book production during the
'twenties used gravure processes and
sepia inks which combined with a matt
paper surface to create evocative
atmospheric images of the landscape. (Below) John Keating
This was the pictorial idiom of tourism (Above) E. 0. Hoppé Night's Candles are Burnt Out 1929
The Canal, Manchester 1926
and its most ambitious expression in Illustration No. 218, Picturesque Great Britain Oil on canvas, 44 x 5o in.
Britain came in 1926 with E. 0. Hoppe's
Picturesque Great Britain, a lavish large
format book with 304 photographs of
landscape and architecture; of these, two
featured steelworks in Sheffield and
another two canals and warehouses in
Manchester, with the remaining 300
showing the quainter corners of the
countryside and of the more restful
cities.
Hoppe's model was Kurt Hielscher's
Deutschland of 1924, also published by
Ernst Wasmuth in Berlin. Hielscher
pictured Germany as ominously Gothic,
as a romantic national landscape, and his
vision was guided by the example of the
landscape painting of Friedrich and the
German romantics. Hoppe referred to
the topographical traditions of the early
nineteenth century in Britain and his
country appears as a quiet domestic affair
of nooks and crannies, thatched cottages
and cathedral closes. The significance
of Hoppe's work in Picturesque Great
Britain is that he was a perceptive
commercial photographer,' attentive to
the mood of the public as potential
clientele: the image which he captured
belonged to his time rather than to any
aspiration of his own towards art. He recognized and supported in an Masterman and Hoppe represented an
expressed an image of the country which introduction by Charles Masterman, one alignment of commercial opportunism
was that of the hegemony, the inheritors of the co-directors of British propaganda and commitment to a traditionalist view of
to whom the cathedrals and the Oxford during the First War. Masterman was Britain on the brink of major social
colleges were a sign of the deep- aware of the potential of photography change. In his introduction to the
rootedness and legitimacy of the as a medium for propaganda and had photographs Masterman, recognized the
existing social order. His photographs, used it extensively during the war when threat to the green and pleasant land :
both in their selection of subject and he shared responsibility for the shaping `How far this England will endure under
presentation on the page, were an of public opinion with the Director of the influence of the new mechanical
affirmation of the existence of traditional Information in the Foreign Office, transport, which is sprawling the new
Britain; their ideological function was John Buchan.' The collaboration of town dwellers into dismal architectural
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