Pixiq

OK, I’ll admit it. I’m an unabashed pictorialist. Rather than the subject, pictorialism is more concerned with the aesthetics and the emotional impact of the image and employed whatever handcrafted means from manipulating the negative to complex darkroom techniques to add artistic touches sometimes going to far as to emulate traditional disciplines such as painting and sketching.

In many photographic circles today “pictorialism” has a less than has less of a positive connotation that “straight” photography but you may not even know of the culture war fought in the 1940’s between Ansel Adams speaking for Group f/64 and Edward Mortensen for the pictorialism in a battle for the soul of photography. In the end it was a ten-round decision for straight photography and a TKO for the pictorialists but there are many who could never let it die. The advent of digital image manipulation let a lot of pictorialists out of the closet and into the daylight allowing us to create the kind of artistic images we’ve always dreamed of producing.

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