subjective photography

Subjective photography, broadly, photography undertaken for purposes of self-expression rather than to record the appearance of the external world. The distinction was classically formulated by John Szarkowski in his introduction to the catalogue of the Mirrors and Windows exhibition at MoMA, New York, in 1978. Celebrated examples of subjective photography are the cloud pictures, or Equivalents, of Alfred Stieglitz, who wrote ‘All art is but a picture of certain basic relationships; an equivalent of the artist's most profound experience of life’; and Minor White's work, influenced by Oriental philosophy.

However, the term Subjektive Photographie, coined by Otto Steinert at the end of the 1940s and associated with the German fotoform group, signified a protest against the anodyne salon and yearbook photography of the post-war period and a more experimental approach harking back to the New Vision of the 1920s and 1930s. In this context, ‘subjective’ implied a willingness to ignore the technical and aesthetic conventions of the ‘good photograph’. Three large Subjektive Photographie exhibitions were held between 1951 and 1958.

— Robin Lenman

Bibliography

• ‘Subjektive Fotografie’: Der deutsche Beitrag 1948 bis 1963 (1989)