Word: pictorialists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...term f/64 designates the smallest lens opening on cameras then used, the one that gave the greatest depth of focus and hence produced images that were sharp from foreground to background. To these photographers, f/64 also stood for "straight" photography, as against pictorialist fuzz. Instead of continuous tone, they went for high contrast. They also cropped and isolated their subjects: driftwood, seashells, worn rocks at Point Lobos, or the polished interior of Weston's Mexican toilet bowl...
...Peach Robinson and O.G. Rejlander tried to use multiple imagery--painstakingly assembled in the darkroom--to create "historical" pictures, portraying in one vast tableau all the heroes, villains, and valiant deeds of great events. They more or less failed, but for thirty years, the so-called "Photo-secession" or pictorialist school produced soft-focus, dreamy images with such titles as "Madonna with Child" or "Blessed Art Thou Among Women...
...emblematic of Doty's failure to comprehend this, but his miscomprehension of what makes for good photography also shows up in his failure to hang the best photographs by several of the "classic" photographers. Doty's treatment of Edward Steichen and Alfred Steiglitz, both closely associated with the "pictorialist" school, is good, but the pictures by Weston and Evans which he selected distort their work. Both men represent the birth of modern photography, but by trying to cast them as "hard focus pictorialists" he takes all the edge out of their radical innovations. Weston is represented with several abstractly formal...