pictorialism

(noun)

A school of artistic photography that emphasized using photography to mimic certain styles of contemporary painting, that flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Images were typically characterized by a soft focus and color or brushstroke manipulation.

Related Terms

Examples of pictorialism in the following topics:

  • Photography in the Latter 20th Century

    • A culminating moment for pictorialism and for photography in general occurred in 1910, when the Albright Gallery in Buffalo bought 15 photographs from Alfred Stieglitz's 291 Gallery.
    • At first, fine art photographers tried to imitate painting styles, giving rise to Pictorialism, a style that uses soft focus to create a dreamy, 'romantic' look.
    • Pictorialism dominated photography from about 1885 to 1915, though it was still being promoted by some as late as the 1940s.
    • Pictorialism gradually declined in popularity after 1920, fading out of popularity completely by the end of World War II.
    • Discuss the progression of photography from pictorialism and straight photography to the snapshot aesthetic and conceptual work.

  • Motion Diagrams

    • A motion diagram is a pictorial description of an object's motion and represents the position of an object at equally spaced time intervals.
    • A motion diagram is a pictorial description of the motion of an object.

  • Statistical Graphics

    • Statistical graphics allow results to be displayed in some sort of pictorial form and include scatter plots, histograms, and box plots.
    • Whereas statistics and data analysis procedures generally yield their output in numeric or tabular form, graphical techniques allow such results to be displayed in some sort of pictorial form.

  • Codices of the Aztecs

    • Aztec codices, or pictorial manuscripts, are among the best primary sources of information on Aztec culture.
    • Pre-colonial codices differ from colonial codices in that they are largely pictorial and not meant to symbolize spoken or written narratives.
    • Like all pre-colonial codices, it was originally entirely pictorial in nature, although some Spanish descriptions were later added.
    • The Aubin Codex is a pictorial history of the Aztecs from their departure from Aztlán through the Spanish conquest to the early Spanish colonial period, ending in 1607.

  • Real Numbers, Functions, and Graphs

    • Graphs can be used to represent these relationships pictorially.

  • Codices of the Mixtec

    • In Mixtec, the relationships among pictorial elements denote the meaning of the text, whereas in other Mesoamerican writing the pictorial representations are not incorporated into the text.
    • This arrangement of the bride and groom is a purely pictorial convention, with no connection to the language.

  • Gothic Architecture and Sculpture

    • Gothic Architecture and Arch Elements in England from Charles Knight's Pictorial Gallery of Arts, 1858

  • Documents

    • The texts and documents can be either written, pictorial, or visual in form.

  • Space

    • Artists have devoted a great deal of time to experimenting with perspectives and degrees of flatness of the pictorial plane.

  • Capacitors in AC Circuits: Capacitive Reactance and Phasor Diagrams

    • To get there, we will first introduce a very general, pictorial way of representing a sinusoidal wave, using phasor.
    • Since phasors are represented by a magnitude (or modulus) and an angle, it is pictorially represented by a rotating arrow (or a vector) in x-y plane.