The invention of photography was part of the process of modernization of the means of production that took place during the Industrial Revolution. In the 19th century, more and more goods once made by hand, including images, became machine made. Photography is a modern form of image making, contributing to the development of modernism, for example in painting, by taking on its representational tasks.
By the beginning of the 20th century, with the diffusion of illustrated magazines and newspapers, photography was a mass- communication medium. Photojournalism acquired authority and glamour, and document-like photographs were used in advertising as symbols of modernity. Artists and photographers began looking at the photographs used in mass culture, to develop an aesthetic true to the intrinsic qualities of photographic materials: the accurate rendition of visible reality; framing that crops into a larger spatial and temporal context; viewpoints and perspectives generated by modern lenses and typically modern spatial organizations (for example, tall buildings); and sharp, black-and-white images. This objective, mechanized vision became art by foregrounding not its subject matter, but its formal structure as an image.
In the USA, Alfred Stieglitz rejected the hand-crafted look of pictorialism, in favour of a more ‘straight’ photography (The Steerage, 1907). In Camera Work, he championed photographers who used the realism of the medium to create beauty from everyday life, and to make statements about the nature of photography, rather than about the world; (Paul Strand, Blind Woman, 1916). Their work often abstracted reality by eliminating social or spatial context; by using viewpoints that flattened pictorial space, acknowledging the flatness of the picture plane; and by emphasizing shape and tonal rendition in highlights and shadows as much as in the actual subject matter (Edward Weston, Nude, 1936).
In Europe, avant-garde artists sought to break down traditional definitions of art, and the barriers between art and design, often with the utopian aim to merge art with everyday life. They also questioned the notion of artistic identity based on the myth of the artist as a special kind of being emoting over a canvas in the isolation of a studio. Instead, they embraced technologically advanced means of production, developed mixed-media practices, and often engaged with social and political issues. At the Bauhaus, László Moholy-Nagy explored the abstract possibilities of photographic and cinematic images. In Soviet Russia, Alexander Rodchenko's work (Chauffeur, 1933) advocated a new aesthetic vision that would change individual and mass consciousness. He emphasized the constructedness of images, rejecting the illusion that photographic representations could be an unproblematic mirror of reality. The use of reflective surfaces is a common modernist device to reveal how every viewpoint, artistic or ideological, is constructed rather than natural. In Italy, the Futurists exploited blurred movement to celebrate the speed and dynamism of modern life. In Berlin and throughout Europe, Dadaist photomontage was used to challenge the authority of mass-cultural representations.
The development of modernist photography has often involved the recategorization of documentary or otherwise functional photographs in an art context. An example is the posthumous redefinition of Eugène Atget as a modernist photographer, first by Surrealist magazines, then by Berenice Abbott's exhibitions and articles. A similar process can be seen in the use of social documentary photographs in the Family of Man exhibition.
In the post-1945 period, American modernism became dominant in the West, emphasizing specialization and purity, and downplaying the political engagement of earlier avant-garde groups: to be modern, each discipline had to refine the definition of its own competencies. Photography became art by transcending its reality- bearing function through the subjectivity that photographers, as authors of their images, managed to instil in their pictures. The writings of the art critic Clement Greenberg and the photographic historian Beaumont Newhall, and the exhibitions mounted by MoMA, New York, emphasized formal and aesthetic qualities that defined ‘masters’ and ‘canonical’ images that transcended their historical and social context. A tradition of essential photographic values was identified for successive photographers to explore and push to further limits. This ‘authorial’ approach is often contrasted with the theories of photographic meaning developed since the late 1970s. It does not follow from this, however, that modernism did not theorize about photography; rather that it did so implicitly, using a critical language of universal values which erased the traces of its own ideological construction.
— Patrizia di Bello
Bibliography
- Nesbit, M., “‘Photography, Art and Modernity’”, in J. C. Lemagny and A. Rouillé (eds.), A History of Photography (1987).
- Varnedoe, K., A Fine Disregard: What Makes Modern Art Modern (1989).
- Harrison C., and Wood, P. (eds.), Art in Theory 1900-1990 (1992).
- Edwards, S., “‘Photography and Modernity in Nineteenth- Century France’”, in P. Wood (ed.), The Challenge of the Avant-Garde (1999).
- Childs, P., Modernism (2000)
