Quote Originally Posted by Mark Sawyer
A bit off-topic, but it's worth noting in this turn of the discussion that Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, indeed, most of the pioneer "Straight Photography/Group f/64" photographers were soft-focus pictorialists early in their careers.
Absolutely true. And Stieglitz was just about the last of them to ditch pictorialism (he became a modernist in his rhetoric and in his curating and teaching long before he became one in his work). It's often been noted that his young protege Paul Strand more than anyone else actually showed him the path to the formal modernist esthetic.