ABSTRACT
The concerted effort of Victorian "pictorial photographers" to legitimate photographic art alongside painting, sculpture, and printmaking and the continuing struggle in the twentieth century to position photography within the institutions of the fine-art world have constituted a central theme for photographic history. Sharing historical roots with fine-art photography in turn-of-the-century photographic societies and clubs, amateur clubs have carried on a tradition of pictorial photography whose clearly defined aesthetic formulas have not varied with the fashions of high art. Pictorial photography was practiced more widely than ever after World War I. The ironic relationship between the amateur pictorialist tradition and emerging modernist forms of twentieth-century photography is apparent in the debates that took place between Edward Weston and William Mortenson in the amateur journal Camera Craft during 1938. Amateur photography, then, is an arena of cultural production whose history has long existed "between" art and industry.
