…the strongest part of a picture is the sensation and the feeling which it creates, this being done through the agency of certain familiar objects more or less accurately depicted and represented with more or less completeness.The MOTIVE, then, in all pictorial work is to convey some thought or idea or sensation by means of a chosen subject.
Pictorialism is the thesis that mental images represent in the manner of pictures.
Pictorialism is the Fine Art of making and appreciating mainly decorative spacial (static) pictures possessing aesthetic qualities.
We are forced to the conclusion that pictorialism is the dominant urge of those photographers today who use the medium for their own and other people's pleasure.
Here it's worth briefly noting, however, that pictorialism is only one of two major representationalist theories of vision and imagination (or mental imagery), the other being propositionalism.
Viewed from the vantage of the end of the twentieth century, pictorialism is an early attempt to construct a picture theory that argues that the conventions of picture-making apply to all pictorial forms regardless of the medium.
Atmosphere is the medium through which we see all things. In order, therefore, to see them in their true value on a photograph, as we do in Nature, atmosphere must be there. Atmosphere softens all lines; it graduates the transition from light to shade; it is essential to the reproduction of the sense of distance. That dimness of outline which is characteristic for distant objects is due to atmosphere. Now, what atmosphere is to Nature, tone is to a picture.