Ruptures in truth: The photography of Thomas Eakins and the pictorialist vision

Thomas Eakins (1844--1916) is best known as a realist painter and as an artist with a deep interest in science. Although this legacy has been shaped primarily by his contributions as a painter, Eakins was also an avid amateur photographer. The full scope of his photographic work was little known until 1985, when a cache of his negatives and prints were acquired by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Instead of documenting modern life or to emulating the scientific photography of the late nineteenth century, Eakins's photography indicates a preoccupation with romanticized subject matter, including blurred landscapes and idealized nudes. This contradiction, that a scientific medium would allow a realist artist a place to be less concerned with Realism, is the concern of this research.;Eakins, was clearly influenced by the emerging American Pictorialist movement of the late nineteenth century, however, he was using this aesthetic to somewhat different ends. Looking at Eakins's photographs against examples of pictorialist photographers, allows an examination of these differences. Eakins relied on the photographic medium's inherent reference to optical truth, a reliance which then allowed him to explore subject matter and aesthetic themes absent from his painting. As has been suggested of his use of Realism in painting, Eakins's photography positioned viewers to scrutinize their expectations of visual truth. Eakins's photographic romanticism, usually denied an important place in his oeuvre, can, in light of this research, be seen to signify a prescient engagement with modernisms conflicted relationship to objective and subjective truths.