Pictorialism is an approach to photography that emphasizes beauty of subject matter, tonality, and composition rather than the documentation of reality. This occurred from the 1880s and onwards when photographers strived for photography to be art by trying to make pictures that resemble paintings. Pictorialism has several key features which consist of using substances such as Vaseline on the camera lens to create a blur effect. Additionally another key characteristic is that photographers used to scratch the negatives to manipulate their photographs. Common themes within the style are the use of soft focus, colour tinting, and visible manipulation such as composite images or the addition of brushstrokes. The pictorialism movement led to great innovation in the field of photography with a number of the photographers associated with it responsible for developing new techniques to further their artistic vision. This therefore created the foundations for later advances in colour photography and other technical processes.
Above is a photograph taken by Henry Peach Robinson which represented pictorialism in several ways. This composite print, combining five different negatives, focuses on an intimate scene of a very sick young woman, surrounded by three family members. Robinson pioneered the composite image, which became a foundation of Pictorialism. To his contemporary audience the photograph was controversial, as many felt that photography was too literal a medium to portray such an intimate and painful scene.
Straight photography / Realism emphasizes and engages with the camera’s own technical capability to produce images sharp in focus and rich in detail. The term generally refers to photographs that are not manipulated, either in the taking of the image or by darkroom or digital processes. Paul Strand and Alfred Stieglitz pioneered Straight photography in New York around the 1910s which is still continuing within the current decade. Realism / straight photography continues to define contemporary photographs, while also being the foundation for many relevant others areas of photography. These consist of documentary, street photography, photojournalism and even later progressed to abstract photography. Straight photography is a process and time-based approach. It represents immediacy, the passing of time as in history, or the freezing of time as in a snapshot. In a photograph, time is described by the movements of the subject. Each photographic style adapted the approach to emphasize its own treatment of form, sensory experience, or the changes in the social and cultural environment.
The photograph above was take by Paul Strand who was an American photographer and filmmaker. Although the photograph in which he has taken may come across as simple and minimalistic, it shows a clear close-up view of regular kitchen bowls that are used to study the effects of light and shadows. Paul Strand said that his “abstract” studies were a matter of clarifying “for me what I now refer to as the abstract method, which was first revealed in the paintings of Picasso, Braque, Léger and others… .”
Modernism is when photographers created sharply focused images, with emphasis on formal qualities, exploiting, rather than obscuring the camera as an essentially mechanical and technological tool. Modern Photography encompassed trends in the medium from the early 1900s through to the 1960s. The move from early photography to Modern Photography is distinguished by a departure from the language and constraints of traditional art, such as painting, and this change in attitude was mirrored by changes in practice. The invention of photography was part of the process of modernization of the means of production that too place during the industrial revolution.
Post-modernism is arose in the second half of the 20th century, and it encompasses a variety of themes. First and foremost, postmodernism builds on the themes and conceptual ideas that began during the modernist period. Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism and was highly influenced by the second world war. postmodernism refers to the state that lacks a central hierarchy and one that is complex, ambiguous and diverse. It also represented a loss in faith in human reason as well as provides a bleak prognosis of the human condition. Overall modernism and postmodernism were both movements that engaged from an analysis of events within the modern period from the perspective of the values of enlightenment.