Romanticism

In photographic discourse, Romanticism names a sensibility or way of feeling that prizes subjective experience over exact truth, aiming to address broad questions of meaning, memory, and human existence rather than everyday description. It develops in the late eighteenth century as a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism, neoclassical formality, and the materialist pressures of industrial modernity, often seeking renewal through imagination, individualism, and a transcendent union of nature, humanity, science, and the divine. Photography arrives near the end of high Romantic culture, yet early commentators and practitioners frequently frame the camera in Romantic terms, treating it as a medium through which Nature might "draw" or reproduce herself.

Romantic influence in photography appears in motifs associated with the sublime and the picturesque: vast, overwhelming landscapes; storms, mountains, and mist that dwarf human scale; and scenes marked by irregularity, roughness, and evocative decay, including ruins and pastoral idylls. Compositional devices such as the Rückenfigur—a solitary figure seen from behind facing the landscape—encourage viewers to project their own emotions into the scene. Romantic imagery also extends to mourning and memory, including post-mortem portraits and depictions of fading youth that function as memento mori. Technically, this sensibility often aligns with softening and handwork that privileges atmosphere over forensic detail: calotypes valued for grain and painterly blur, deliberate soft focus achieved through optics or diffusion, and manipulations such as retouching, combination printing, or alternative processes (gum bichromate, platinum, bromoil) that emphasize the photograph as a crafted object. Staged tableaux vivants further connect photography to allegory and literary narrative.

Realist critics in the mid-nineteenth century reject Romantic idealization in favor of plain descriptions of ordinary life, and some dismiss pictorial staging as fraudulent. Emerson’s Naturalism also argues against theatrical artifice, while still defending soft focus as closer to human vision than mechanical sharpness. Later modernist "straight" approaches intensify this critique, treating Romantic and pictorial styles as sentimental or bourgeois and promoting clarity and machine-age aesthetics. Postmodern and neo-romantic work returns to Romantic imagery—solitude, the sublime, melancholic beauty, and decay—to address ecological anxiety, digital alienation, or dystopian urban settings.