| camera obscura | From the Italian for "dark" (obscura) and "room" (camera), a lightproof box with a small opening or lens for projecting an image of an object or a scene onto a surface from which the image can be observed or copied.
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| naturalism | The mid-nineteenth-century style or school of art, anticipated in the painting of John Constable, that emphasizes truth to nature's actual appearances and a democratic range of subject matter, including scenes of everyday life and commonplace landscape views. Painting outdoors so as to capture with honesty the freshness and light of everyday scenes, Charles-François Daubigny and young future impressionists such as Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir worked within the naturalist approach.
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| daguerreotype | A photograph made on a plate of chemically treated metal or glass, named after Louis Daguerre, the French artist and inventor who developed photography in the 1830s.
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| pictorialism | A movement in vanguard photography at one with the symbolist aesthetics of the late nineteenth century that emphasizes the artistic (pictorial) possibilities of the camera's imagery. Turn-of-the-century photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Gertrude Kasebier considered themselves pictorialists and strove for formal beauty, suggestive moods, and poetic truths in their work.
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| straight photography | In general terms, any photographic approach that emphasizes straightforward documentation.
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| expressionism | The approach to creating art that focuses on the exaggeration or distortion of natural forms for the purpose of expressing the artist's subjective feelings.
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| surrealism | The movement in the literary and visual arts from the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s that sought to reveal the contents of the unconscious mind and dream world, joining the conscious and unconscious realms of existence in a superreality or "surreality." In the visual arts, surrealist artists pursued two general stylistic directions, one representational (Salvador Dalí, René Magritte) and the other highly abstract (André Masson).
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| social realism | A term used in the twentieth century to describe a realistic style of art that portrays, often from a leftist political perspective, the life of the common person in society. In the United States, social realism in painting, sculpture, photography, and the graphic arts was the dominant style of the Depression years of the 1930s.
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