# When Photos Looked Like Paintings – Pictorialism  ## Metadata - Author: [[Nigel Williams]] - Full Title: When Photos Looked Like Paintings – Pictorialism - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: Pictorialism was a late 19th-century movement that aimed to elevate photography to an art form by emphasizing beauty and composition. Photographers used soft-focus techniques and artistic processes to create images that resembled paintings. Although it declined with the rise of straight photography, Pictorialism influenced future artistic photography and the ongoing debate about photography as art. - URL: https://flashofdarkness.com/pictorialism/ ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > From its inception, when it took a mastery of optics, chemistry, and an arcane workflow to take and process a photograph there had been a debate about the nature of photography. Was this new invention only capable of reproduction or could it transcend its machine origins and produce art? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jb04yf6az7v96af4s2e5a9x8)) > In the early years of its development, photography was sometimes looked down upon as purely mechanical, but as early as 1853 the English miniaturist Sir William John Newton was championing the cause of photography as art. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jb04yvn0wp997b3qnm2mzybh))