Word: pictorialists
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...photography became the new folk art, and fine-art practitioners had to scramble for a way to distinguish themselves from the mobs of snapshooters. Their response was pictorialism, an international style of soft focus, poetic yearnings and darkroom tricks that were beyond the abilities of the untrained. During the pictorialist phase of their careers, Alvin Langdon Coburn in England and Edward Steichen in the U.S. turned away from mere realism toward a metaphysical art, one of broad hazy forms that hinted at an elusive realm of ideas and spirit...
Paradoxically, the care with which Lean lets such intricately wrought correspondences speak for themselves creates a danger that the partially attentive may again mistake him for what he is not: an empty pictorialist. Or, because his characters wear costumes and move against an authentic historical background, in classically composed scenes that do not obviously assert his personality or linger over his cleverness, some people may persist in seeing him as an old-fashioned moviemaker...
...term f/64 designates the smallest lens opening on cameras then used, the one that gave the greatest depth of focus and hence produced images that were sharp from foreground to background. To these photographers, f/64 also stood for "straight" photography, as against pictorialist fuzz. Instead of continuous tone, they went for high contrast. They also cropped and isolated their subjects: driftwood, seashells, worn rocks at Point Lobos, or the polished interior of Weston's Mexican toilet bowl...
...Peach Robinson and O.G. Rejlander tried to use multiple imagery--painstakingly assembled in the darkroom--to create "historical" pictures, portraying in one vast tableau all the heroes, villains, and valiant deeds of great events. They more or less failed, but for thirty years, the so-called "Photo-secession" or pictorialist school produced soft-focus, dreamy images with such titles as "Madonna with Child" or "Blessed Art Thou Among Women...
...emblematic of Doty's failure to comprehend this, but his miscomprehension of what makes for good photography also shows up in his failure to hang the best photographs by several of the "classic" photographers. Doty's treatment of Edward Steichen and Alfred Steiglitz, both closely associated with the "pictorialist" school, is good, but the pictures by Weston and Evans which he selected distort their work. Both men represent the birth of modern photography, but by trying to cast them as "hard focus pictorialists" he takes all the edge out of their radical innovations. Weston is represented with several abstractly formal...