Listen to part of a lecture in an art history class. The professor is discussing the history of photography in the United States.

P: So how many of you in the class are photographers?

S: Well, I take lots of pictures, but I wouldn't really consider myself an actual photographer. I just pretty much point and click.

P: Okay, so we tend to think of creating art as something that's not so easy, right? So when the first handheld cameras came on the market towards the end of the 1800s. Photography became a sort of commonplace activity, something anyone could do. Well, then there were some consequences for the art of photography. The view was that painters chose what to put on the canvas and made use of a technical skill with control over the brush, material and subject matter, but amateur photographers just copied exactly what was seen through the lens without any personal embellishments. So photography was seen as less of an art, less of a craft than painting.

S: But I mean, there definitely can be a lot more to it than that. P: Well, at least one person agreed with you, an American photographer named Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz felt that it was up to serious photographers to express their artistry through the medium, to separate themselves from amateur enthusiasts. This movement in the late 18, early 1900s that Stiglitz was involved in to emphasize the craft and the emotional impact of an image, rather than its scene, was called pictorialism, and its practitioners were called pictorialists.

Pictorialists used many different means to manipulate their photographs before and after they were shot to achieve certain effects. For instance, pictorialists combine images from different pictures into one photograph. They also might scratch or paint over the negative, which can have a really interesting effect on the finished product.

Another frequently used technique was what's called Soft Focus. Basically, the outline of the subject stays sharp, but the images inside the outlines blurred slightly, resulting in a sort of Misty, a sort of dreamy effect. Let's look at an 1892 photograph by Stieglitz called The Terminal. Do you see how the overall picture has generally muted shades while still maintaining a high contrast between dark and light? Stieglitz did this to maintain an atmospheric feel to the photograph, one where the emotions of the setting were brought out by contrast, but where overall the photograph remains soft, ambient.

S: Yeah, the steam, uh, that's coming up off the horses, that really adds to that dreamy atmosphere too.

P: Absolutely, the steam generates a sense of atmosphere. A device that pictorialists use to mimic the brushstrokes in a painting. Also, uh, notice how the scenes arranged. Subject composition is another technique that pictorialists use to give their photographs an expressive quality. See how the man has his back toward the viewer. If he were turned around, the picture would be more about him. We'd naturally focus on his face. Instead, we focus equally on the surroundings.

My last point involves the actual content of the photo. It may not immediately jump out at you. The world has changed a bit since the late 1800s, but the scene depicted in the terminal was rather commonplace, an everyday occurrence, and that was actually progressive. The idea that art, or to include the, the ordinary, and not just important events or people, was a growing idea outside of photography as well. Yes. Kevin?

S: yeah, you know, looking at the photo, I'm kind of struck by how it resembles an impressionist painting. I guess maybe because of the steam and the soft focus.

P: that's an excellent point. And in fact, the soft focus, the use of steam, the general glow. This was a style borrowed from the Impressionist paintings, which were popular at the time, where the use of color and light trumped the need for an accurate representation of the subject.

So back to Stieglitz. He was an artist, but he was also an editor and gallery owner. He actually started a group called the photo secession to reach out to similar minded photographers to, uh, to band together to share their work jointly with the rest of the world. And well, he apparently had a rather overbearing personality. He made some enemies. His personality even apparently caused a few photographers to leave their group. But this strong personality may also be what drove him to make an impact. And although the movement itself was somewhat short lived, the impact pictorialism had on photography and its perception as an art form is undeniable.