Bill, There is much info on the web about pictorial photography. At the baseline the answer is that in the 1910's and earlier there were always people who thought photography could be artistic. The ideal then and now was as simple as trying to make something beautiful.
A quick history lesson. For the first 25 years lens technology was so limited that no one got a sharp picture without some difficulty. Things progressed and in the mid 1860's new glasses and new designs got lenses with at least an f8 aperture that were super sharp in the middle and you could make a sharp plate if you used a long focal length for your format. By 1895 the anastigmats had arrived and you could make sharp pictures corner to corner. Billions of them. Kodak had introduced cameras for the masses and by 1910 photography had gone in a direction just the opposite of where the groups that thought it could ever be an art form thought it should go.
People like F. Holland Day and Alvin Langdon Coburn sought a lens that would synthesize the picture but not make a clinically sharp picture like all the masses were making. Dallmeyer in England, Puyo in France, and Pinkham & Smith in the United States began to make lenses with purpose built non corrections that would define a photograph but not make one that was so sharp that it didn't leave room for the mind to play with. Of course there has always been a place in portraiture both then and now for a lens that gives the sitter some help. An invention called the Hasselblad had squashed pictorial portraiture even preceeding the digital age. They've all looked alike since 1970. Boring. It wasn't so as late as 1948. Find a copy of Charles Abel's book "Professional Portrait Lightings". All of these antique lenses were still in common use just 60 years ago. No one knew they were rare or special in some of our lifetimes.
Do some searches for; photo secessionists, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Alfred Steiglitz, Julia Margaret Cameron, Gertrude Kasebier, Clarence White if you're actually interested. Try to remember that just because it has no value for you doesn't mean there is no value. I don't go to operas but my vote counts very little towards the whole. The argument can certainly be made that modern digital photography has gotten awfully clinical, awfully low. Whoopee another oversaturated sharp picture that the operator had to put little or no effort into. Pay $400 bucks, aim it, push the button. Impressive.