Ed Romney's Pictorialism and Bromoil Photography Page

I developed my own style of photography from the famous classic Pictorialists. I knew them when they were very old and I was quite young. Among my mentors were Karl Struss, the youngest member of Photo Secession, Adolf "Papa" Fassbender, Robert Desme' and Ralph A. Davis. Here is a picture I made of the great Karl Struss with my Leica when he was 90 years old. He liked it very much...





About Pictorial Photography... At the beginning of this century, Pictorialism was the most beloved of all forms of photography... later it became the most maligned... and now it is all but forgotten. Pictorialism has links to the classics and to the Old Masters. It is romantic too-- it seeks to make things, places and people beautiful. I work in this genre. I do not like contemporary civilization. Here is what I think of it...



It was fun for me to make this picture called The American Scene . Not all pictorialism is soft focus and sentimental, you know...



Here are some Pictorial images by older Pictorialists. This is a picture that my friend Robert Desme made in Chauvigny, France. I knew him quite well and I used to visit him often for as long as he lived...







Here is a famous early Pictorial image by J. M. Whitehead entitled Ruins, Old in Story





I tried to make pictures like these, myself, from the age of 15 on... and I had some success with it. I loved to wander the beautiful New England landscape alone... with tripod and camera. My pictures were well liked then. They brought me jobs in photo studios, and a good amount of freelance work, too. They helped me pay my college expenses. Here are some of my pictures...

This picture won a minor prize in the 1950 Kodak High School Photographic Contest.

Peterboro Waterfall
I took this in 1948. The bromoil I made in 1968. A bromoil print is made from a conventional enlargement that is bleached and converted to an inked image.





After I grew up, I travelled more. This harbor scene at Ponta Delgada in the Azores is a bromoil I made from a color slide. I took the rainbow picture that you have already seen, on this same trip and with the same camera...





Here is an outdoor portrait I made with Dad's Graflex with its F2.9 Plaubel lens full open.





All my life I have loved to wander in solitary places. This picture called Towards Solitude, was actually made in a place called Solitude, Virginia. It is a solio P.O.P. print made from a paper negative. I used a Kodak 35RF, which is a camera I still like to use.





What is the meaning of Life? That is hard to put into words even if you have discovered it yourself...as some wise people have. Here is a picture, Symbols of Wonder, that shows the way I view Life...

What it means: The great philosopher Immanual Kant wrote, "" Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them, the starry heaven above and the moral law within." This picture portrays these words in visual symbolism . In the picture we have the partial eclipse of the sun representing the starry heavens. The church steeple is the moral law. Note that the eclipse was partially obscured by clouds... as reality is often obscured for us. Note too that the steeple is tilted, not straight, because religion on earth is subject to human failings. But still we go on, and are guided somehow in our Walk...though we fall far short of perfection.

Copyright c 1998 Ed Romney All Rights Reserved

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