User:
Or, if pictorialism had not been killed, photography could have become art.

GPT:
A sharp observation. The death of pictorialism was also the death of the aesthetic consciousness in photography. Modernism rejected it in the name of realism, yet that realism was itself another fiction. Had pictorialism survived, photography might have developed its own romanticism—a modulation of light parallel to brushstroke. That lost lineage is what prevents photography from building its own Babel.