In this digital age, it's hard to believe how appalled purists were when George Eastman invented the little hand-held Kodak camera in the late 1800s.

Pittsburgher Orlando E. Romig's "Curves at Edgar Thompson," 1963, is part of the exhibition "Pictorialism in Pittsburgh" at Silver Eye Center for Photography. Click photo for larger image. "Pictorialism in Pittsburgh" Where: Silver Eye Center for Photography, 1015 East Carson St., South Side. When: Through Aug. 19. Hours are noon to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and until 9 p.m. Thursdays. Admission: Free. For information on accompanying events, call 412-431-1810 or visit www.silvereye.org

Any hack can take a picture now, they thought. It won't be art anymore!

So while the general population was happily filling their family photo albums, artist-photographers were banding together in protest. They formed Pictorialist Societies, concerned with keeping photography beautiful and artistic, and mounted important exhibitions of such photos.

Pittsburgh is home to the oldest continuing Pictorialist society, the Photographic Section of The Academy of Science and Art, which started in 1885. The group meets in Mt. Lebanon and has joined the Silver Eye Center for Photography, South Side, to present a rare exhibition of a selection of its archival and current photos, "Pictorialism in Pittsburgh."

The Photo Section owns more than 700 photos by both Pittsburgh photographers and people from around the world who entered the Pittsburgh Photo Salon, the group's competition that ran annually from 1914-81. Photographic Section historian Val Buttignol, along with Silver Eye executive director Linda Benedict-Jones, winnowed the archives to fewer than 50 photos for this exhibition.

"Skylight," 1953, by Alan H. Sperling is another example from the Pictorialist Societies, artists who banded together to keep photography beautiful and artistic. Click photo for larger image.

Many of the images capture a favorite Pictorialist theme -- industrial scenes, made hazy with smoke belching from factories and trains. Pittsburgh was a natural subject. One such image is Selden I. Davis' "Pittsburghesque" (1947), which shows a steam train on one of the city's characteristically gray days. Others include Orlando E. Romig's "Curves at Edgar Thompson" (1963), which shows railroad tracks curving artfully around the smoky Edgar Thompson Works steel mill, and P.F. Squire's "Mills in Winter" (1936), which captures the contrast between dark black mills and the white smoke from their smokestacks and white snow on their roofs. Three Pittsburgh photographers -- Romig, Oscar C. Reiter and Charles K. Archer -- have multiple photos in this exhibition. Some scenes are still recognizable.

But historical Pittsburgh is not the only theme.

"We tried to get a range in time and also a range in photography as it changed from the early years, with the very soft images, up to the present," Buttignol said.

Thus, Pittsburgh images are scattered among prints from Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C., even Scotland and China. The earliest image is from 1908. Along with the 46 archival photos, there are 15 photos by current Photo Section members, who now often use color and digital photography. The modern works are for sale.

As Buttignol pointed out, many of the images -- particularly the earliest ones -- are hazy and muted. That's not the result of prehistoric photography equipment -- it's intentional. Pictorialists liked blurred images and soft lighting, which often combined to produce photos that looked more like paintings.

Sometimes they achieved that effect through subject matter -- those smoky factories and trains. But many images were not industrial; landscapes, portraits and nature studies were also popular. So the blurred effect had to come from complex, intricate printing processes.

Perhaps the most complex was the process Juan Ortiz-Echague used on one of the larger images, "Alcazar de Segovia" (1936), a shot of a Spanish castle. As Buttignol described it in greatly simplified laymen's terms, Ortiz-Echague mixed his own chemicals and prepared and treated the photo paper himself. As a final step, he placed the treated paper on a slanted board and painstakingly poured a special solution over it, wearing off the carbon to lighten some areas of the image while keeping other areas dark.

Some of the clouds in the resulting image might truly have been in the sky that day, but others might have been derived purely from the printing process.

Some things about photography have changed greatly since early Pictorialist days, but others are much the same. Ralph Gurley of West Mifflin, whose "Coke Works at Sunset" (a plume of mill smoke in a colorful sky) appears in the exhibition, noted that computer software such as PhotoShop is the popular modern tool for tinkering with photos. But such tinkering has been going on in the darkroom from the earliest days of photography, so the modern era didn't invent the debate over how much tinkering is too much.

Even the backs of archival photos reveal the changes in photography over the century. Four such photo-backs are displayed.

Typically, the photographer made only one print of a photo and then mailed it off to various competitions. At each competition, a sticker was affixed to the back of each photograph, listing the competition name and city. Winning entries also received special stickers.

The back of a photograph became an interesting catalog of its travels.

The mail-in photo competition is a dying breed, though. As Gurley noted, photos must be mailed in custom-made cases to avoid damage, and rising shipping costs make such competitions impractical. Now it's more popular to enter digital competitions. You e-mail your submission and then receive a CD of all the works that were entered.

Although much has changed in the modern era, what links the historical photos in this exhibition to the present-day ones -- and historic to modern-day Pictorialist work in general -- is the continuing concern with photography as artistry.