Impressionism
An art movement and photographic approach focused on fleeting light, softened detail, and atmospheric, subjective impressions of the visible world.
Impressionism is an art movement in late nineteenth-century painting that emphasizes visible brushwork, open composition, and the shifting effects of natural light. Rather than aiming for detailed likeness, it seeks to record an immediate sensory impression of a scene at a particular moment, focusing on transient conditions and everyday modern life. The term itself arises from a satirical review of Claude Monet's painting "Impression, Sunrise," and later becomes a touchstone in discussions of how painting and photography renegotiate their respective roles in representing the visible world. With photography taking over much of the work of precise depiction, painting turns toward color, movement, and subjective experience, while also borrowing from photographic devices such as cropped or seemingly accidental framing.
In photography, Impressionism first appears in the 1890s as a label promoted within Pictorialism for images that emphasize tonal values, soft focus, and a subjective rendering of atmosphere and light. It is historically associated with techniques that mute descriptive detail and encourage a painterly surface, and later criticism often folds "Photographic Impressionism" into the broader category of Pictorialism rather than treating it as a separate movement.
At the same time, an enduring Impressionist impulse continues beyond the decline of Pictorialism. This impulse favors the expression of inner feeling and sensation over factual depiction, aiming to convey an essential impression of a scene and to invite multiple, open-ended interpretations. Contemporary practitioners extend this approach through techniques such as intentional camera movement, in-camera multiple exposure, dragged shutter effects, and digital layering, often seeking images that feel dreamlike, intuitive, or even guided by the unconscious. In this sense, photographic Impressionism names both a historically situated strand within Pictorialism and an ongoing set of aesthetic and philosophical concerns that persist in tension with calls for straight photography and strict descriptive clarity.