ABSTRACT
Modernist photography in Belgium was born on the still warm ashes of a major movement in the history of photography: Pictorialism. The renewal of photographic expression in the movement of the avant-gardes during the first quarter of the 20th century, which the Hungarian Moholy-Nagy named the 'New Vision', thus found in Belgium a deferred echo. In the field of amateur photography, the modernist and conservative poles confront each other through published articles, particularly in the pages of the Bulletin of the Association Belge de Photographie. The work of Germaine Van Parys provides, as far as it is concerned, an illustration of the developments of photoreportage between the two world wars, of which Van Parys appears as a major figure. But, before studying these works, it is necessary to come back to what 'Pictorialism' signifies, to understand why it remained anchored in Belgium for such a long period of time.
