Photographer explored the beauty of ‘Pictorialism’

By Connie Zeigler

William L. O’Connor was an art lover. Although he worked in his father’s wholesale grocery business, M. O’Connor &

Wear and tear has affected this image taken about 1910, but it still shows William O'Connor's great composition and use of light.

Co., eventually becoming president of the firm, William was an avid and gifted photographer and a collector of paintings. The photographs he took are heirlooms for his family, and they are also fine examples of a genre called Pictorialism.

Pictorialism arose as a photographic style in late 19th Century Europe. About the same time that Impressionist painters were taking painting in an entirely new direction, away from being strictly representational, Pictorialists were producing photographic images that were also impressionistic and aesthetic with meaning imbued by the photographer.

George Eastman had introduced the first camera for Kodak in 1888, making photography easier and accessible to amateurs. The Pictorialists turned away from the idea of amateur photography. They were the first to raise the photographic image into the world of art.

Pictorialist photographs are often called “painterly.” Unlike the staidly posed sharply focused daguerreotypes of the Civil War Era, they can appear at a glance to be paintings with their hazy black and white or sepia-toned, atmospheric and softly focused images. The use of natural light was important for Pictorialists. Bucolic outdoor scenes and candid-appearing indoor portraits, often of women or children posed in front of windows, are common. Pictorialists also took romantic shots of laborers and turned the grimy streets of cities into hazy works of art using soft-focus lenses and new printing techniques, such as combining several negatives into one print or using special chemicals that softened detail and fuzzed the images.

In the late 19th Century, Pictorialism swept through Europe and found its place as part of the avant garde art world. In 1903, photographer Alfred Stieglitz made Pictorialism popular in the United States with his magazine, “Camera Work.” About the time Stieglitz was championing European Pictorialism, William O’Connor of Indianapolis was in Ireland courting the woman who would soon be his wife, Eleanor (Nellie, or Bam) Carr.

This photo of an unknown child shows O'Connor's sense of humor as well as nice techniques.

Eleanor’s wealthy family lived in a 100-year-old large stone house in Galway called Lakeview House. The country of Ireland, Lakeview House, nearby villagers and Eleanor and her family were all picturesque to William O’Connor, and all were the subjects of shots taken during his extended visit. These photos include scenes of everyday life in an Irish village: women spinning and churning butter, a group of men gathered around a makeshift stage in front of an old stone house, several children sharing a seat on an old rubble wall with their dog, and field workers. In the more intimate photographs of Eleanor and her family, William is also in some of the shots. Either someone else must have taken some of them, or perhaps William set the camera’s timer and then scurried into place before it snapped the picture.

Whoever took the photographs in Ireland was clearly influenced by the new ideas of Pictorialism. Almost all are open-air settings capturing common scenes with an artist’s eye. One photo shows William and Nellie picnicking on the banks of a creek or river. She leans against a basket; he’s stretched out reclining on one elbow below her holding up a small box to her. The light picks out the white flounce on her hat, the ruffle of her blouse, and the white collar tip and cuff of his shirt. The scene seems too intimate to have been shot by a third party. The image seems filled with meaning that we can only ponder. Did William set the camera and then hustle into place at his lady’s feet? Is the box he’s holding an engagement ring?

We can’t answer those questions, but we can say that while William was in Ireland he convinced Eleanor May Angela Joseph Aloysus Carr (sometimes known as Nellie, sometimes known as Bam) to marry him. Her 1904 wedding portrait is posed and formal and nothing like the atmospheric exterior shots of Ireland that William took. In keeping with the solemnity of the occasion this is a traditional bridal portrait, sharply focused on her in white gown and veil in front of a dark screen.

After their wedding, William returned to Indianapolis with his new bride and an interest in the new photography style of Pictorialism. Although he must have resumed his work at the M. O’Connor Co., the images in his family’s collection suggest he also began to dabble more and more in artistic photography. And around this time William began to purchase art. His collection would eventually include paintings by T. C. Steele and Wayman Adams, members of the Hoosier Group who were gaining fame and selling their work through H. Lieber Co. in Downtown Indianapolis. H. Lieber Co. was a photographic equipment and photo-finishing business, so it’s likely that William’s interest in photography also exposed him to these rising Hoosier artists.

William and Nellie had their first child, Eileen, in 1905. About two years later came William, two years after that, Thomas, then Patricia, Michael, John, Richard and, finally, Elizabeth arrived in 1922. Over the years, William took beautiful Pictorialist-style photographs of his children and their friends. In one, two of the boys, Billy and Tom, sit before a lighted window reading a book. They veritably glow with the soft light coming into the frame on the right before it’s swallowed into the darkness on the left. In another, a small child (probably a neighbor boy) stands in front of a spindly tree looking forlornly down at the grass. Dressed in white, the child lights up the scene, even though he is in soft focus and looking down not at the camera.

The O’Connor family albums grew fat with these painterly photographs over time: one shows one of the girls on the sidewalk to a cottage surrounded by overgrown, tangled bushes; she’s placed in the tracery shadows cast by a tall tree. Another has Bam in her finery standing beside her daughter, who has a golf club in one hand, ready to putt a golf ball off a rug placed on the white sidewalk in front of her. The sidewalk winds behind them to the back door of a large house. Still another is an incredible portrait of a blonde child with only his face visible in the middle of a homemade star-shaped costume. Shot outside, a few fern fronds are visible on a wall or tree behind the giant star surrounding the cherubic face.

Through the 1910s William explored the softened beauty of Pictorialism as he recorded the lives of family, friends and neighbors, creating portraits that would be passed down through many generations. But, by the 1920s photography was changing again. Alfred Stieglitz and his cronies had moved away from the painterly, atmospheric Pictorialism to a harsher, modernism in their photographs. Stieglitz became famous for his sharply focused shots of New York City and his unromantic portraits of Georgia O’Keefe in this period.

William L. O’Connor continued to be interested in photography and his images changed a bit with the times as well, although he never became a strict modernist in his style. His photographs from around this time have a more solid realistic, less dreamy look: in one, his children are in a boat tied up at a quay. The children are older, the image is sharper and the overall feel is more like a modern photograph, as if there is less hidden meaning to convey and more attention paid to bringing the details of the lapping water and the squinting children into focus.

William appears in many of the photographs of this vintage, a still handsome, now silver-haired man with his round-faced wife and their brood of children coming of age. William L. O’Connor died in 1944. He was the president of M. O’Connor & Co. wholesale grocers. But of course he was much more than that. He was also a husband, father, grandfather and gifted photographer.

William L. O’Connor’s pictorialist photographs are family heirlooms now. But they are also snapshots of a certain period and of a style that turned the medium of photography into an art form. William may not have published photographs in Stieglitz’s cutting edge “Camera Work,” but his images reveal a deft hand at composition and a romantic vision skillfully expressed in sepia tone.

Connie Zeigler is president and owner of C. Resources, Inc. Connie is a writer and a historic preservationist who consults on preservation and greening of historic buildings. She lives in Fountain Square and blogs at INArchitecture on cresourcesinc.blogspot. com.