From its very beginning, photography had an enriching but also ambiguous relationship with painting. Photographers start to 'imitate' the painting in seascapes, staged scenes or studio portraits in front of a painted background. Painters like Edgar Degas, Fernand Khnopff, Franz von Stuck and Henri Evenepoel exchanged their sketchbook for a camera. Gustave Courbet, Gustave Moreau and Eugène Delacroix, for their part, were 'inspired' by pictures taken by photographers as Julien Vallou de Villeneuve, Henri Rupp and Eugène Durieu.
Around the symbolism not only unfolds the relationship between photography and painting, but also zooms in on the pictorialism, the photographic equivalent of the symbolism in painting.
On the basis of masterpieces this book casts a surprising glance at a crucial episode in the history of art, in which artists discovered a whole new way to capture reality.