The first decades of the twentieth century saw the growth of a photographic style called Pictorialism that relied on painterly effects akin to those of Impressionist painters. Pictorialist photographers stressed abstraction, suggestion, and emotion rather than clear representation. The photographer manipulated the lens or created effects in the darkroom that gave the photograph a soft focus or shadow, deliberately obscuring detail and otherwise altering the image. Photographers in Central Asia doubtless experimented with these methods, especially in the post-Revolutionary years, since Pictorialism as a movement lasted longer in the Soviet Union than in Europe and remained widespread until the mid 1930s. (The artist-photographer Max Penson worked in the Pictorialist style in both the 1920s and in the 1940s.) Well-known Pictorialist photographers such as Yuri Eremin and Vasily Ulytin worked in the Caucasus, creating romantic, soft-focus images in that dramatic landscape. While photographs in what may be a deliberate attempt at Pictorialist style are occasionally found in Central Asia, no named Central Asian photographer can be identified working in that style until after the Russian Revolution. Perhaps this is because the Pictorialist style stood in contradiction to the documentary interests that drove most of Central Asian photography and it never took hold as an important style in the region.