The New Vision of Photography

The explosive development of photography as a medium of untold

expressive power and as a primary vehicle of modern consciousness
occurred during the two decades immediately following the Great War. In
the aftermath of this first totally mechanized conflict, avant-garde artists,
commercial illustrators, and journalists turned to photography as if seeking
to discover through its mechanisms and materials something of the soul of
contemporary industrial society.
Photography's long-acknowledged power to mirror the face of the world
was by no means abandoned, but in the 1920s and '30s a host of
unconventional forms and techniques suddenly flourished. Abstract
photograms, photomontages composed of fragmented images, the
combination of photographs with modern typography and graphic design in
posters and magazine pagesall were facets of what artist and theorist
Lszl Moholy-Nagy (18951946) enthusiastically described as a "new
vision" rooted in the technological culture of the twentieth century.
An influential teacher at the Bauhaus in Germany, Moholy-Nagy
championed unexpected vantage points and playful printing techniques to
engender a fresh rapport with the visible world (1987.1100.499). Other
photographers in Germany, such as August Sander (18761964)
(1987.1100.82) and Albert Renger-Patzsch (18971966) (2005.100.147),
emphasized a rigorous objectivity grounded in the close observation of
detail. And with the advent of the 35mm camera in the early 1930s,
photojournalism and street photography became possessed of a new
grace, deftness, and mobility.
In France, Surrealism was the gravitational center for avant-garde
photography between the wars. Launched in 1924 by the poet Andr

Breton, the Surrealist movement aimed at the psychic and social

transformation of the individual through the replacing of bourgeois
conventions with new values of spiritual adventure, poetry, and eroticism.
Essentially a philosophical and literary movement, Surrealism was greatly
indebted to the techniques of psychoanalysis, and Freud's research into
free association and dream imagery. Surrealist photographers made use of
such techniques as double exposure, combination printing, and reversed
tonality (1987.1100.81) to evoke the union of dream and reality.
In Russia, the Revolution of 1917 imposed transformation through a
reordered society. It enlisted the enthusiastic participation of artists like El
Lissitzky (18901941) and Aleksandr Rodchenko (18911956), who saw in
photography the most efficient way to express the dynamic reshaping of
their country. In their photographs, they used a repertoire of defamiliarizing
devicesextreme up and down angles (1987.1100.5), tilted horizons,
fragmentary close-ups, abstracted formsas part of an attempt to break
old habits of perception and visual representation.
The late 1920s saw a series of international exhibitions devoted to new
vision photography. The most significant of these was Film und Foto, an
exhibition held in Stuttgart, Germany, in MayJuly 1929, which included
approximately 1,000 works from Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United
States.
The rise of Stalinism and Fascism in the 1930s would disillusion and
silence many of the photographers associated with the new vision. By turns
euphoric and despairing, prey to utopian optimism or deep spiritual disarray,
the short period between the two world wars remains one of the richest in
photographic history.