The esthetic aspects of images triumph in Plastic Photography. Its origins can be found in Pictorialist Photography that took place between 1890 and 1914. The subjectivity of the artist had to be perceived in the final result. To this end, images were taken only once. Furthermore, new techniques and procedures were experimented with in order to always enrich the result a little more.

In the period between the two World Wars, Plastic Photography became part of the Vanguard group. Both Dadaists as well as Surrealists contributed their personal visions of society and politics, even contributing their own technical alternatives, such as photomontage. But this enrichment could not have been possible without a series of artists who came from other disciplines and who embraced photography as one more field of plastic expression. an Ray, César Domela, Francis Picabia, Otto Wols andJean Arp are some of the artists who actively participated in this transformation.

However, Plastic Photography was not completely defined until the late 1970s, when creators from the world of mass media and publicity burst into the exhibition halls seeking images that could justify themselves. The United States and Europe received these new Art gurus, who like Bruce Weber, Helmut Newton, Irving Penn or Robert Mapplethorpe, made it possible that today there are almost as many collectors of photography as for graphic work.