ABSTRACT
Pictorialism had been an aesthetic movement in nineteenth-century photography, whereby photographers sought status as art for their photographs, primarily through manipulation techniques such as soft focus, painting on the negatives or the use of 'artsy' textured papers. It had instead been turned into abstractions of form, shape and texture, so that some level of uncertainty or ambiguity was still present, but had been achieved through visual selection rather than manual alteration-the eye rather than the hand. The transparent surface does not obstruct or impede the image and, as such, allows the message or information contained in the subject to come to the fore. Essentially, the prints at Family of Man (FoM) operated as a kind of photo-journalism and in fact, the exhibition has been described as a 'three-dimensional version of a picture-magazine'. One final effect of the transparent print surface used at FoM that must also be examined was its lack of ‘High Art’ associations..
