What is pictorial photography?
Many pictorialists used soft focus, filters, Vaseline on the lens, various darkroom manipulations and processes to get a “painterly” look. Alfred Stieglitz (1864 – 1946) is a good general representative of the pictorialists. The movement is by no means dead, and many photographers working today still try to get a look that is sometimes anything but “photographic” in the sense of, say, Ansel Adams and the f/64 school, which emphasized very “straight” photography with crisp focus and infinite detail.
