Jim Craine
William Mortensen, "Fear"
1927, halftone reproduction
William Mortensen’s Creative Pictorialism techniques and subject matter contrasted greatly with the “straight” or “purist” photography of his contemporaries Adams and Weston. He utilized literature, art history and psychology to create his images and then further modified and manipulated the image during the development and printing processes – in direct opposition to the realists who emphasized the purity of their image. For this, Mortensen was attacked and shunned by Adams and his f/64 group, Adams even saying, “to us, Mortensen was the anti-Christ.” He fell out of favor, his work was pulled from exhibitions and museums at the behest of Adams and the Adams clique wrote him out of the history of photography. Mortensen found favor though in the demimonde of photography, creating his most striking images of the monstrous, the grotesque, the nude and the occult. He opened the Mortensen School of Photography in Laguna Beach, teaching his distinctive techniques to a new interested in the expanding the boundaries of modern photography.
