Introduction I the following essay I am going to be looking at what I believe to be the key characteristics of Pictorialism as well as this I will also be looking at the people I believe to of had the most impact on Pictorialism as a movement by analysing there works and ideology’s, by doing this I hope to answer the question ‘What are the characteristics of Pictorialism?’ in a fulfilling and informative way whilst giving my biased and cynical British views on certain aspects, characters and events within the movement. The phrase Pictorialism was first coined within the context of photography in Henry Peach Robinson book entitled ‘Pictorial Effect in Photography: Being Hints On Composition And Chiaroscuro For Photographers.’ Written in 1869 an age when ‘’9 out of ten photographers are ignorant to art’’ [1] and the photographic proses was seen by most as something scientific opposed to something that can in the right hands be art. In many ways Pictorialism came about as a reaction to the small minded and bigoted nature of the art world of this time (its still pretty much the same today), it is because largely of Pictorialism that photography is accepted in the art world today. Naturalism and Peter Henry Emerson There are many characteristics in Pictorialism one of its most notably being it’s out of focus style. This is something that evolved as a characteristic of Pictorialism when it was still only a baby and was developing from its distant cousin naturalism, this now famous characteristic was originally pushed by someone who would have, in the early 1880’s made only stunning sharp pictures of nature, this was Peter Henry Emerson, a photographers whose roots lye within Naturalism and bird watching. Emerson later became one of the key figures in having photography accepted as an art form writing 8 books on photography and a manuscript entitled a history of artistic photography (1936), He originally pushed the idea of out of focus images to his students instructing them to make photographs ‘’just as sharp as the eye sees it and no sharper’’ [2]. Believing much like many do now with digital photography that the images presented by the camera were not in fact a true representation of what the human eye could actually see. The Development of Pictorial Effect Where as Emerson strived often for the truth within the image, Pictorialism started to move away from this in 1890 where much like in art the substance within the image starting to become more important ‘stressing beauty over fact’ this became apparent within the development of the ‘pictorial effect’ inspired by the atmospherically soft brush strokes of painter from the Barbizon school. Photographers believed that by coating their own paper, before or during the development process with obvious brush strokes and marks, made their photographs works of art opposed to works of science replicating effects that were created when making a painting almost as if they were trying to re-create the authenticity of classic works of art that people at that time didn't feel photographs possessed. I feel these brush strokes also made the work feel as though it was not just an image trapped in a piece of paper but a work that now stood out and belonged in a three dimensional world opposed to a flat one. The brush strokes much like choosing to use a softer focus also aloud the photographer to portray his or her own objective view of the scene it was this that manly the photographer Robert Demachy felt separated the art of photography from the straight science of photography that you see in Eadweard Muybridge’s work ‘’A straight print may be beautiful, and it may prove upper abundantly that its author is an artist: but it cannot be a work of art.. a work of art must be transcription, not a copy of nature it must be subjective not objective’’[3] I feel as though this quote from Demachy sums up quite nicely the points put across in the previous paragraph and sums up many of the thought and practical methods behind the movement of Pictorialism. Animal Locomotion, Plate 695, Eadweard