07.09.2025 | 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.
Alchemy & Photography — Transmuting Light
In the nineteenth century, early photographers worked in darkrooms like modern alchemists, transforming light and silver salts into enduring images. Their chemical “transmutations” imbued photography with an aura of magic and, symbolically, fulfilled the alchemist’s dream of arresting time and preserving a fleeting moment forever.
Spirit Photography — Dialogues with the Invisible
The Spiritualist movement popularised “spirit photography,” in which cameras appeared to reveal ghostly figures alongside the living. Although controversial, these haunting images captivated the public and suggested that the photographic plate could serve as a fragile bridge to realms beyond direct perception.
Symbolist Imagery — From Theosophy to the Rose+Croix
Around 1900, photographers embraced Symbolism, drawing on Theosophy’s vision of hidden realities and the Salon de la Rose+Croix’s call for dream-like, spiritual art. Featured here are rare Autochromes by Belgian pictorialist Alfonse Van Besten (1865 – 1926). Produced on Lumière plates shortly after their 1907 debut, these glass transparencies translate Symbolist reverie into colour: velvet tonalities, pointillist grain and softly diffused light evoke stained-glass windows, inviting viewers to contemplate the threshold where matter dissolves into vision.
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.
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.
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
Collectie F.Van Hoof-G.Williame
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