ABSTRACT
The pictorialism movement, which emerged in the late 19th century in France and England, quickly reached the United States and then Brazil. Pictorialism can be defined as an aesthetic movement that aimed to establish the status of photography as art. This process involved photographers, their views, the photographs they produced, and their ideas and precepts about fine-art photography, creating and spreading aesthetic standards and forming an international circuit. In analyzing the dissemination and circulation of pictorial precepts from the viewpoint of the categories of center and periphery, one notes a multilayered circulation of ideas and artifacts, composing a kaleidoscope of images and productions that makes it difficult to identify the center from which sprouted all technical and aesthetic innovations and solutions. Thus, it was proposed to question the Eurocentric perspective. This chapter aims to analyze the educational function of the pictorialism movement from the production of pictorial photographers and the aesthetic education. The spread of pictorialism and its intense visibility promoted by different strategies, besides the sharing of ideas and practices among groups of photographers, going beyond national borders, can characterize pictorialism as a school in the broad and open conception of school in its philosophical and informal character.
