In Brittany

A significant Pictorialist photographer in France, Demachy created images that rivaled paintings in their variations of tone, texture, and lighting effects. Demachy’s aims were closely aligned with those of Alfred Stieglitz, with whom he regularly corresponded for over a decade, and those of the Photo-Secessionists in New York. In Brittany appeared in Stieglitz’s journal of avant-garde photography Camera Work, to which Demachy contributed essays. In 1910, he wrote: “Nature is often beautiful, of course, but never artistic ‘per se,’ for there can be not art without the intervention of the artist in the making of the picture.”

In this photogravure—a process that allows a photographic image to be etched onto a copper plate and then printed—Demachy has posed a girl in traditional Breton dress against a view of the seaside in northwestern France. Demachy relied on figures and nature as subjects for his images, but he firmly believed in the photographer’s role in determining the aesthetic component.