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Matinee: 'Léonard Misonne '
28 June 2025
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 610th in our series of Saturday matinees today: Léonard Misonne .
This 11:12 video from Lin Workshop presents the photographs of the Belgian Pictorialist Léonard Misonne (1870-1943). It was Misonne who pointed out, "The subject is nothing, light is everything." Appreciated for his atmospheric even poetic images, he framed many of his images with the light coming from behind his subject.
Pictorialists have been, in our time, neglected. But it is a form of self-impoverishment not to know the work of Julia Margaret Cameron or William Edward Dassonville (who helped the young Ansel Adams). Imogen Cunningham and Alfred Stieglitz, to name just two, also produced images in that style.
Pictorialism was an attempt to take photography behind a mere mimetic representation of reality by imbuing the image with painterly attributes. It was the painterly part, which featured soft focus and dramatic lighting, that damned the style as younger photographers looked for something that was neither literal representation nor cloaked in the guise of an existing art. Group f/64's champion of sharp focus and tonal range turned out to be their solution.
And certainly persists today as the dominant aesthetic. When we talk about edge-to-edge sharpness in a lens or the bit-depth of a sensor, we are trumpeting the values first emphasized by Group f/64.
We're young enough to be unspoiled by the photography-as-art debate in which Pictorialism became a villain. So we come to Pictorialism as just another way to shoot an image. And we find it quite charming. You'll want to pause this video several times to take in what Misonne has captured, falling into the scene and living vividly in another century.
Interestingly, the winner of that debate with Pictorialism has no simple name as a photographic movement. It's been called variously Straight Photography, Realism and Modernism.
But for 11 minutes today, you can escape its confines through Misonne's lens and wonder what all the fuss was about.