ABSTRACT
Since its inception in the last decade of the nineteenth century in Europe, pictorialism as a style of photography drew from the work of traditional art forms such as painting, with the intention of elevating photography to the status of art (Bunnell 1992; Seamon 1997; Middleton 2011). This took the form initially of creating images that resembled drawings, watercolours and painting. However, this particular modality declined around the First World War. According to Rice (1998), in the 1930s and 1940s both in the United States and in Europe, there was resurgence on a mass scale of documentary photography in the era of war and depression, with war photography rendering artistic and formal concerns a low priority. However, by the late 1940s and early 1950s “artists proceeded to reclaim the aesthetic isolationism that they had lost in the heat of political events” (663). Subsequently, they deployed pictorialism’s older tradition of subjective vision while taking into account the camera as a rapidly developing technical tool. Thus, photographers were less interested in constructing pictures that bore a likeness to paintings but sought rather to put forward images that invoked thought, reflection and personal engagement.
