Figure 1 – Leonard Missone, London’s Waterloo Place, 1899, in the public domain in the United States because of its age.

Coming from a photographic generation that worshiped the f/64 group, it is almost blasphemous to admit being drawn to pictorialist art. But I have already admitted previously in this blog my admiration for Annie Brigman (The Bubble 1909), Emile Joachim Constant Puyo (Montmartre 1906), and th early works of Edward Steichen (The Flat Iron Building at Night 1904). So why stop there?

A few weeks back I discovered the dreamy works of Leonard Missone, and really fell into a rapture.  So today’s Favorite Photograph is one he took of London’s Waterloo Place in 1899 and is shown as Figure 1. Missone was, in fact, a student of Puyo’s so the similarity is understandable.

Misonne was a Belgian photographer, the greatest of the Belgian pictorialists.  He studied mining engineering at the Catholic University of Louvain (1834-1968). However he was bitten by the muse and never, in fact, practiced engineering. In university he became interested in music and art.  He started taking photographs in 1891 and from 1896 onward, it was his exclusive medium.

The blurred painterly admospheric effects, especially the way light creeps around objects in the fog were his hallmark, and “London’s Waterloo Place” is defining of his art, which earned his work the appellation “Corot photography. Missone worked in a wide range of printing processes such as oil, Fresson, and gum-bichromate. In 1931 he invented and patented a screened that he called the “Flou-Net” that was placed in front of the camera lens to produce a range of soft-sharp effects, and in 1935, he developed the mediobrome process, which was a cross between a bromide and oil print.

We have all walked down damp streets like this on a foggy evening. We have seen the wagon, now car, tracks on the damp street. Look at the photograph and the characteristic feel and smell come back to you as does the way in which the fog damps the street sounds creating a private place among the crowds. I have seen this work characterized as a painting on the web and I think that this mistake would have pleased Missone.