Arthur Kales and the Soft Focus World of Pictorialist Photography

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In the early decades of the twentieth century, photography was still finding its identity. Was it a precise tool for recording reality, or something closer to painting? For Arthur Kales, it was firmly the latter.

Born in 1882 in the Arizona Territory, Kales didn't begin his career with a camera in mind. He moved to California in 1903 to study law at the University of California, Berkeley, and initially followed a conventional professional path. Yet, like many drawn into the artistic circles of the West Coast at the time, he found himself increasingly interested in photography, particularly a movement that was gaining momentum in California known as Pictorialism.

Pictorialist photographers believed that a photograph should be more than a straightforward record. Instead, it should resemble a crafted work of art, borrowing from the traditions of drawing, painting, and etching. This meant deliberately moving away from the sharp, detailed clarity that cameras were capable of producing. Soft focus, careful staging, and manipulation of tone became central tools. Images were often composed with the same level of planning and intention as a painting.

This idea was not entirely new. As early as 1853, the English painter William John Newton had suggested that photographs might achieve greater artistic value if they were slightly out of focus. The notion sparked long-standing debates. As photography historian Naomi Rosenblum later observed, the medium quickly revealed its “dual character,” capable of serving both as art and as document, with much of the nineteenth century spent arguing over which role mattered more.

Kales entered this conversation in his late twenties. After working in advertising in Los Angeles, he became actively involved in the Camera Pictorialists of Los Angeles around 1918. From that point, his commitment to the movement deepened. His work spanned a wide range of subjects, but it is consistently marked by a distinctive style: delicate compositions, carefully controlled lighting, and an almost dreamlike atmosphere.

One of the techniques Kales employed was the bromoil process, a labour intensive method that allowed photographers to manipulate prints by hand. A standard photographic print would be chemically treated so that its surface hardened, enabling ink to adhere selectively. This allowed the artist to adjust both light and dark areas, producing a broader tonal range and a more painterly finish. The result was an image that felt less mechanical and more interpretative.

By the early 1920s, Kales had become a recognised figure within photographic circles. He was a regular contributor to Photogram of the Year, one of the period’s key publications, and his work circulated widely among enthusiasts and critics. In 1928, his reputation was further cemented when he was awarded a fellowship by the Royal Photographic Society in the United Kingdom. That same year, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. organised a fifty print retrospective of his work, an indication of the regard in which he was held.

Despite this recognition, Kales’s name is less widely known today than some of his contemporaries. Part of this may be due to the broader shift in photographic taste that occurred in the 1930s, when sharp focus and modernist clarity began to replace the softer, more interpretative style of Pictorialism. Even so, his photographs remain a clear example of a moment when artists were actively testing the boundaries of what photography could be.

Arthur Kales died in 1936 at the age of 54. His work, characterised by its quiet precision and careful construction, continues to reflect a period when photography was not yet fixed in its purpose, but open to experimentation and interpretation.