Pictorialism

DEFINITION

An early 20th Century photography movement lead by Alfred Stieglitz (see AskART), it sought to "elevate" photography from the status of a technological process to that of high art through the emulation of the aesthetics of late 18th and early 19th century European painting. Pictorialists favored a soft focus approach in their images, as well as compositions that employed "expressive" arrangements of light and dark masses, rather than sharply rendered detail. Sources: Grant Arnold, Vancouver Art Gallery and Lisa Hostetler, Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.