Pictorialism

Time Period: 1885 to 1915 
Key Characteristics/Conventions: Pictorialism wished to approach photography like a painting, where the images taken resemble brush strokes etc rather than a photo. The style places beauty, tonality and composition above anything else when creating an accurate visual record. They wanted to move photography away from scientific uses and instead to artistic ideologies, to do this they took inspiration from certain artworks from which they adapted the style it was painted and composed in. Pictorialists were the first photographers to have their work recognized as a form of art, committing their lives to photographic manipulation exploration, leading many to find new techniques not previously used or seen before.     
Artists Associated: Henry Peach Robinson, Julia Margaret Cameron, Peter Henry Emerson, The Vienna Camera Clud (Group), The Brotherhood of the Linked Ring (Group), Photo-Secession (Group).
Key Works: Morning (1908 - Clarence H.White), Pond in Winter (1888, Peter Henry Emerson), I wait (1972, Rachel Gurney), The Steerage (1907, Alfred Stieglitz).
Methods/Techniques/Processes: The style of work was created by manipulating images in the darkroom, scratching and marking their prints so that they imitate the texture of a canvas, using soft focus, blurred and fuzzy imagery based on allegorical and spiritual subject matter, including religious scenes.

Realism/Straight Photography 

Time Period: 1910 to present day
Key Characteristics/Conventions: Straight photography emphasizes and engages the camera's own technical capability to produce images sharp and in focus with lots of detail. The photographers wished to makes images that were more 'photographic' rather than 'painterly', not wanting to treat photography as some monochrome painting. It is a process of time and represents immediacy, the passing time in history or the freezing of time in a snapshot, quoted by Henri Cartier-Bresson as "we work in unison with movement as though it were a presentiment on the way in which life itself unfolds. But inside movement there is one moment in which the elements in motion are in balance". 
Artists Associated: Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Lewis W Hine, Jacob Riis, Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams.
Key Works: Porch Shadows (1916, Paul Strand), Blind Woman New York (1916, Paul Strand), The Tetons and the Snake River (1942, Ansel Adams).
Methods/Techniques/Processes: The process is generally not manipulated but instead sharply depicts the image as someone sees it. Straight photographers visualize the image before taking it, stated by Ansel Adams "Get your lighting and exposure correct at the start and both the developing and printing can be practically automatic".