"The Ring Toss," a gum-print six-by-eight-inch photograph produced in 1899 and first published in 1903, has become one of photographer Clarence White's most noted images. It is an example of soft focus, or fuzzy pictorialism, a type of American art photography most practiced around the turn of the century. This analysis of the photograph in particular, and the fuzzy pictorialism movement in general, relates the image to larger social and cultural issues. Parallels between the photograph and a well-known painting by William Merritt Chase demonstrate the growing interest in using photography as art, rather than mere depiction. As a form of plagiarism, it represents the ambitions of a group of amateur American photographers at the end of the 19th century to lift photography to an art by copying the codes and conventions of painting. In its subject matter, it reaffirms bourgeois values and accepted meanings in a society upset by the new urban-industrial order. (SLD)