Pictorialism and Modernism Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Pictorialism and Modernism - Essay Example The essay "Pictorialism and Modernism" compares pictorialism with modernism. The availability of printmaking machinery and materials that were previously reserved for illustration and reproduction allowed the artists to venture into the new artistic era. This led photographers to experiment their divergent techniques, which included the documentary style that involved capturing memorable events and representing them in documentaries. The era of documentary photography raised the need to respect people as humans rather than stereotypic images that had less resemblance to the represented being. This gave rise to the era of modernism, which made a large leap from the previous documentary photography. Therefore, it was during the pictorialism era that real artistic work could be accurately represented, and this was the era that revolution in artistic work was achieved. However, due to the closeness between the two artistic works, pictorialism may be argued to be a modernism approach to p hotography with the feelings of the artist embraced in the art work. Rocco argues that the era of photography dates back to 1888 when George Eastman introduced the first Kodak camera and this changed photography to the better since then. The first camera made photography to be available for the common man in the street, instead of being a preserve of a few artists. This intervention of the camera greatly reduced the apparatus used in films, and was available to many casual amateurs with no particular training.