Pictorialism was a reinvented form of art in photography mostly active between 1885 and 1915. Pictorialists utilized a variety of darkroom techniques to allow photos to replicate stories or scenes or appear in a dream-like landscape.

👆1890 – The Onion Field, Mersea Island, Essex by George Davison

Straight photography highlights the camera’s ability to produce sharp images that are extremely detailed. The photos produced in this specific type of photography are prepared so that they do not need to be edited. The technique emphasizes the subject as viewed in the camera.

👇1903 – ‘A Sea of Steps’ Wells Cathedral, Steps to Chapter House by Frederick Henry Evans

Straight photography was popular among photographers because it respected the medium’s own technical language for the first time in the history of photography. This type of photography was also the foundation to many other movements like documentary, street photography, and later abstract photography.

Edward Weston and Aaron Siskind were one of the first people to create photographs that transformed subjects into true-to-life objects and abstractions of shapes and patterns. The movement of straight photography allowed them to take photos that relied on the subject for visual interest, in comparison to how the surface quality was the main point of pictorialist photos.

👇1931 – Cabbage Leaf by Edward Weston

Weston photographed arrangements of Cabbage leaves over a nine-year period from 1927 to 1936.

The works of Andreas Gursky and Uta Barth are abstract because they were able to utilize humongous panoramic landscape and compositions to contribute to new forms of art from the 1970s to almost the 2000s.

👆1999 – 99 Cent by Andreas Gursky