A camera is a machine as a paintbrush and chisel are not. That didn’t sit well with aesthetically ambitious photographers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They sought the status of fine artists by suppressing their medium’s technological nature. Pictorialism, as this school of photography was called, employed gauzy visual effects and genteel subject matter in the pursuit ...
SOURCE: Boston Globe at 01:30PM on August 6, 2011