Pictorialism is an approach to photography that emphasizes beauty of subject matter, tonality, and composition rather than the documentation of reality.

The Pictorialist perspective was born in the late 1860's and held sway through the first decade of the 20th century. It approached the camera as a tool that, like the paintbrush and chisel, could be used to make an artistic statement. Thus photographs could have aesthetic value and be linked to the world of art expression.

The name itself derived from the thought of Henry Peach Robinson, British author of Pictorial Effect in Photography (1869). In his desire to separate photography as art from the scientific ends to which it had been applied, Robinson suggested appropriate subject matter and compositional devices, including the joining together of sections of different photographs to form a “composite” image. In the 1880's the British photographer Peter Henry Emerson also sought ways to promote personal expression in camera images. While critical of composite photographs, Emerson and his followers, looking to models provided by artists such as J.M.W. Turner, the painters of the Barbizon school, and the Impressionist painters, attempted to recreate atmospheric effects in nature through attention to focus and tonality.