William Mortensen: The Rebel of American Photography

William Mortensen (1897–1965) remains one of the most polarizing figures in the history of photography. Revered by some as a visionary and dismissed by others as a corrupter of the medium, Mortensen’s career reveals the enduring tension between photography as documentation and photography as art.

Early Life and Career

Born in Utah, Mortensen studied art before moving to Hollywood in the 1920s. There he found work as a still photographer in the film industry, creating dramatic portraits of actors and actresses. His close ties to cinema influenced his photographic style, which often carried a sense of theatricality and elaborate staging.

A Distinctive Style

Mortensen rejected the emerging modernist ideal of “straight photography,” which emphasized sharp focus and unmanipulated images. Instead, he embraced Pictorialism, a movement that treated photography as a painterly art. Using darkroom manipulation, etching, composite printing, and hand-applied effects, he transformed photographs into fantastical, sometimes unsettling visions.Recurring themes in his work included mythology, witchcraft, demons, and the grotesque. These images shocked conventional audiences but also captivated those who saw photography as more than a mechanical medium.

Conflict with Modernists

Mortensen’s approach brought him into direct conflict with the influential Group f/64, which included Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Imogen Cunningham. While they promoted clarity, purity, and realism, Mortensen reveled in distortion and artifice. Adams famously called Mortensen “the Antichrist” of photography, a label that haunted Mortensen’s reputation for decades.As modernism became dominant in American art, Mortensen’s popularity waned, and his work was largely written out of photographic history.

Legacy and Rediscovery

Despite the hostility of his contemporaries, Mortensen left behind a substantial body of work, as well as several instructional books on photographic technique. His writings reveal a sharp intellect and a deep commitment to photography as a fine art.In recent decades, with the rise of postmodernism and digital manipulation, Mortensen has been rediscovered as a precursor to contemporary staged and constructed photography. Today, scholars and artists recognize him as a bold innovator who challenged the boundaries of photographic practice.

William Mortensen’s career illustrates how artistic vision can defy prevailing trends and yet influence future generations. Though he was condemned in his time, his theatrical, experimental images anticipate many of the possibilities embraced by contemporary photography. Far from the “Antichrist,” Mortensen may now be seen as a prophet of photography’s artistic potential.