can indeed call it: Pictorialism. You might as well call it: floutisme. You could call it like we want. If there is any truth in a photograph of Heinrich Kühn, it does not lie in these-isms (it is true that this is rarely the case). It is - assuming that there is one - in this attention every day. But no matter how everyday, I mean, not the everyday as a way of thing in itself inviolate, untouchable, almost sacred, and that photography could only just registered.
The newspaper is a material, like the sound of a musician. We must invent, imagine, always do it again. This daily perfectly trivial to a large middle class who spend their time - that is, Indeed, the impression that you get by looking at photographs of Heinrich Kühn - nothing to do but play (children), walking through the prairie grass as a fun or a little more stripped (the governess mistress Mary) asked. But if this is true and that the photographs do not cease to be interesting, however, is that somehow the truth lies not in the topic, it is elsewhere: in the way the subject is shown .
angles to photograph, ways of framing, geometric synthesis approaches, tones, shades of white - gray - black, including through the gum bichromate technique, appear always tinged with a brown that softens the contrast while keeping the images are still a bit blurry, which does not mean they are never precise, but they are see less detail than a general impression - an atmosphere.
Truth so would be the atmosphere that runs through the work and manifests itself both in family pictures or Portraits in landscapes or still lifes.
The truth is also the form as it is not disembodied but rather in the face of the child who does not look at the smiling photographer ( Hans on the prairie summer , shooting summer 1902), in which a woman's hat back to profile three- quarter, etc.. ( Study gradations, 1908).
There is also the color that appears very early in the work of Heinrich Kühn. This is the first poetic drawing trichromatic gum bichromate "whose mere mention of the particular technique leaves dreamer ( Nature morte aux fruits , 1897). But it is also the idyllic the Prairie (1898), whose dominant Green magnifies the geometric dimension, the diagonal that intersects the photograph in half, separating the foreground grass background tree and slightly cloudy sky.
The truth is the form, at least because it is the same geometric logic that can still be seen through color - or rather it is the geometry that shows the colors - in Hikers on the Prairie (1912-1913). Here the diagonal cut of photography in the opposite direction and isolated beyond the shadow walkers. Printing climbing even though the grass is so green that grass can not really gradient.
Then the autochrome, complex technique of adding color by following the conversion rules shades of black and white. Archaic technique, certainly, but that makes it so much the perception that the photographer did not imagine it better for him. She see halos. As the great (if it is indeed great) Mary on the side (1908). Halos of color who go on the underside of the continuous geometry: downward diagonal which traces two trapezoids of unequal sizes, one green and one yellow-blue bleached in places. Affixed Mary overlooks: an appearance especially blue and white a little green ago - not a ghost, an apparition on the geometrical plane first built.
One subject did not give to see. We need to show it.
Photo: Mary on the slope, 1908 © RMN
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