14.09.2025 | Grand Art in Photography

Symbolism, Esotericism, Occultism (1860 – 1918) Photography in the Art Nouveau Period

An exhibition produced in collaboration with Maison Hannon

Photography was never just about capturing reality. From alchemy to AI, it has always revealed hidden forces, merging chemistry, mystery, and imagination.

The invention of photography was never purely technical; from the beginning, it intertwined with knowledge, revelation, and transformation. In the 13th century, Albertus Magnus noticed his lapis lunaris – a silver nitrate crystal – darkened in sunlight and recorded this among his observations on bezoars and mandrakes. In 1614, Angelo Sala sprinkled paper with silver nitrate and saw it “turn as black as ink.” For these alchemists, the darkening proved the virtus solis, an immaterial solar force capable of reorganising matter.

In the 1720s, Johann Heinrich Schulze conducted decisive experiments: using a silver nitrate and chalk suspension, he showed that light – not heat – caused darkening. Schulze still interpreted this within frameworks allowing for occult philosophy. Thus, when Daguerre and Talbot industrialised photography a century later, people were ready to see photosensitive images as mysterious or prophetic messages akin to ancient oracles.

Rose + Croix and rejection of photography
In 1892, esoteric writer Joséphin Péladan founded the Rose + Croix Salons to promote symbolic, mystical art. The regulations of these six salons (1892-1897) excluded photography; only documentary images, for jury use, were permitted. Doctrine demanded “form be dematerialised so that the idea may radiate”; for Péladan, the camera remained a materialist tool.

The Photo-Club de Paris: elevating photography to fine art
In this Symbolist climate but without declaring itself an official “counter-salon,” Constant Puyo, Robert Demachy, Maurice Bucquet, and René Le Bègue founded the Photo-Club de Paris in 1888. Its first Photographic Art Exhibition opened in January 1894 at Galerie Georges Petit – during the Rose + Croix cycle. Their goal: to have photography recognised as art, submitting prints to juries of artists and Fine Arts inspectors.

Neither Puyo nor Demachy were documented as Theosophical Society members; Theosophical ideas – subtle bodies, auras, vibrations – circulated diffusely in Symbolist circles. Their aesthetics resonated with such notions: gum bichromate prints, multi-layered pigment oils, sanding, rinsing, and re-tinting erased contours to suggest mental or astral spaces. Later critics linked their pictorialist blurs to Helena Blavatsky’s subtle bodies, though Demachy himself never used that terminology.

Eugène Arnaud’s velvety palladiotypes offered a homogeneous dissolution of grain, recalling Péladan’s alchemical prima materia when he compared halide layers to a substance awaiting spirit.

Odilon Redon and Symbolist influence
Painter and lithographer Odilon Redon explored light and shadow before Moholy-Nagy’s photograms; his dreamlike forms and closed faces influenced Symbolist photographers, who turned the camera from documentation to psychic expression.

The Photo-Secession and the American “equivalent”
In America, Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession (1902) continued this trajectory: Camera Work and the Little Galleries promoted Gertrude Käsebier’s gums, Edward Steichen’s platinums, and Clarence H. White’s atmospheric studies as “equivalents” of inner states. The silver image became an alchemical crucible where matter absorbed emotion.

Women’s gaze and reconfiguring roles
Women photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron (active 1864-1879) and Frances Benjamin Johnston (1890s-1920s) challenged conventional images of femininity. Cameron combined pictorialist blur and Pre-Raphaelite symbolism to elevate models to sibyls or visionary saints; Johnston, an American New Woman figure, photographed students, athletes, and reformers, asserting their intellectual and professional autonomy. This prepared the way for Käsebier and Anne Brigman, whose theosophy-infused practice fused spiritual quest with self-assertion. The photosensitive surface became a space where women’s roles and powers were reconfigured alongside light and matter.

Spirit photography: from Hudson to Coates
Interest in the invisible predated the Rose + Croix. In the 1870s, London’s Frederick Hudson produced Britain’s first spirit carte-de-visite photos, showing living sitters beside vaporous forms created by double exposure but believed authentic by spiritualists like Alfred Russel Wallace. In America, William H. Mumler popularised such images in the 1860s; in England, William Hope and his Crewe Circle revived them around 1900.

The discipline’s reference manual, Photographing the Invisible by James Coates (1911), detailed chemistry, lighting, and postures “favourable” for materialisation, argued for the plate as an “astral mirror,” and embedded the camera within mediumistic tradition.

Occult modernities and emerging technologies
German Expressionist cinema (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu) created anxious chiaroscuro to visualise inner torment; in the 1960s, Kirlian electrical coronas transformed Péladan’s fluid halos into spectral discharges. Conceptual artists mixed x-rays, oscillograms, and infrared to redefine proof.

Today, generative AI replaces silver grains with probabilistic pixels; yet the alchemical analogy persists: an invisible field saturated with potential is revealed by a process – here neural network optimisation – akin to transmutation. Milky halos, spectral superpositions, dreamlike chiaroscuro reappear spontaneously; we speak of “ethereal glow” and “Symbolist aura.” Spirit photos of the past and AI composites today blur the lines between proof, apparition, and fiction, favouring psychic coherence over optical realism.

Conclusion
By placing Péladan’s Rose + Croix philosophy, Redon’s dreamlike vision, the Photo-Club’s pictorialism, the Photo-Secession, and spirit photography from Hudson to Coates in resonance, the exhibition shows that photography has always been a meeting place of chemistry, metaphysics, and imagination. Whether a darkened crystal described by Albertus Magnus or a portrait generated by Stable Diffusion, each image acts as an alchemical tablet: it fixes an ephemeral fragment of spacetime and invites the viewer to their own interpretive transmutation.

All prints produced at TinyGallery with historical processes are new interpretations of the original works.

Historic reproductions

Created on salted paper, gum bichromate, and Van Dyke brown processes, and supplemented with crossover images from the archives of the following institutions:

Société Française de Photographie
Musée de la Photographie (Charleroi)                                                                                      Musée de la Vie Wallonne                                                                                                          Province de Liège                                                                                                                        Musée de la Mine et du Développement Durable (Bois-du-Luc)                                          Tiny Gallery (Brussels)                                                                                                              Maison de la Métallurgie et de l’Industrie (Liège)                                                                  Archives et Musée de la Littérature (Brussels)                                                                        Service Général du Patrimoine de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles - Patrimoine numérisé