Discussion 3 ~ The Validity of Abstraction“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” - Ansel Adams When photography was first created it was used primarily for portraits. It was not yet mobile and therefore could not yet be used in genres like landscape or journalism. Portrait painters at the time felt that photography was not legitimately artistic, and this spurred the "Pictorialist" photographic movement. In defense of their art, Pictorialists depicted subjects with soft visual effects and artistic poses. At the beginning of the twentieth century a man named Paul Strand countered the "Pictorialist" movement stating that it was too apologetic, and did not take advantage of the new medium. Paul Strand was an American Modernist photographer leading the drive to establish photography as a valid form of fine art. However, he did not believe that all forms of photography held artistic value. His argument was based on the idea - central to modernist art, of 'trut
