Modernist Equation

Article from the publication It Matters What Your Eyes Can See, initiated by Jaka Babnik to accompany his exhibition at MSUB – Museum of Contemporary Art Beograd (29 November 2024 – 17 February 2025).

Even though photography is entirely an invention of the industrial era, it only became really “modern” almost a century after its invention. The first widespread and unified international style in photography was pictorialism that had, in fact, only perpetuated the formulas and ideas from those early photographers who wanted to be accepted and respected in the world of fine art. Throughout history, some photographers desperately wanted photography to become a form of art, equivalent to painting and graphic art. In order to become artists many photographers of the 19th century set off to replicate the principles of concurrent fine arts. The pictorialist movement took the lead and declared itself the only form of “art photography”, and in doing so they followed the principles of impressionism and post-impressionism. The pictorialist photographers made images of pristine nature or idealised rural scenes, thus ignoring the growing transformations of the cultural landscape due to accelerated industrialisation and urbanisation, while using soft-focus lenses to obtain a distinctive blurry and dreamy atmosphere. By the first decade of the 20th century, when pictorialism was at its peak, the shadow of doubt was cast on its strict rules and artificial aesthetic that did not fit the concept of modernity.

Influenced by the early attempts at modern art, such as fauvism, cubism, expressionism and futurism, some of the most prominent figures in art and photography in the USA, Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, turned against pictorialism, branding it outdated and incapable of expressing the realities of the new era. It was simply the Zeitgeist that brought about the inevitable. The new generation of photographers started to show interest in man-made structures in the ever more industrialised and urbanised world. In her essay “Alfred Stieglitz and American Photography” (2004) Lisa Hostetler wrote that “photography was naturally suited to representing the fast-paced cacophony that increasingly defined modern life.” That was probably the central idea that affected Stieglitz when he took and published his iconic photograph The Steerage (1907) where he aimed to recreate an almost cubist composition. The frozen image from the deck of an ocean liner showcased how artificial elements – products of modern technology, such as the handrail, mast and hat of a man – can be used as the widgets of modern and avant-garde aesthetic. Stieglitz used asymmetrical lines, diagonals and regular shaped objects to formulate an image that could reflect a new reality. The (obvious) social implications of that image were entirely insignificant to the photographer, which reveals another equation: the fact that Stieglitz belonged to the upper-class strata of society and was therefore more interested in formalist and visual challenges than social injustice.

That was the beginning of the new visual culture that had the ability to articulate the new society. The concept of “straight photography” was formulated in the USA amidst the bloodbath of World War I. In 1916, Paul Strand, a young photographer, exhibited in the avant-garde oriented 291 Gallery in New York. In the last issue of the art magazine Camera Work (No. 39-40, 1917), its publisher and editor, Alfred Stieglitz, wrote that “the work of Paul Strand is rooted in the best traditions of photography. His vision is potential. His work is pure and brutally direct. Devoid of all flim-flam; devoid of trickery and of any ism; devoid of any attempt to mystify an ignorant public, including the photographers themselves. These photographs are the direct expression of today.”

In the same magazine Paul Strand also tried to define the principles of modern photography stating that the “fullest realisation of new photography is accomplished without tricks of process or manipulation, through the use of straight photographic methods.” He compared modern photographers to the “creators of skyscrapers who had to face the similar circumstance of no precedent, and it was through that very necessity of evolving a new form, both in architecture and photography that the resulting expression was vitalised.” However, the outburst of new creativity in photography was not a single occurrence and did not happen in a vacuum. There were a number of photographers who resorted to the new style of image making after 1910.

By the end of World War I and in the 1920s there was a vivid development in photography on a practical and theoretical level. Paul Strand coined the term “straight photography”; László Moholy-Nagy defined “new photography” or “new vision”; Albert Renger-Patzsch introduced the photography of “new objectivity”; and El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko promoted constructivist photography as a truly modern medium, a carrier of the socialist ideas of proletarian and popular art. The examples are numerous. In a fairly short period of time in the 1920s the new scene gradually established new aesthetic tendencies that came to dominate the 1930s. The protagonists of new photography aimed to represent the world the way it is, modern and transformative, with sharp focus and veristic expression. They believed that photography found its true autonomous language and expression in modernism. Straight shots, veristic views and strange perspectives became the norm.

Furthermore, the new photographers were not burdened with the fixation that photography is an art form. Instead, they believed that the ideal space for new photography was the printed media that, by the 1920s, became increasingly more visual. Photography played a crucial role in the development of illustrated magazines and tabloids. Visual culture, in which photography and film were dominating disciplines, became an integral part of public discourse. But despite this new-found freedom of modern image making, new photography, like pictorialism, developed formulas and conventions that soon became a trend, a norm, and eventually a cliché.

In the 1920s, which probably saw the greatest turn in image making, photographers became interested in compositions of artificial shapes, lights and shadows, contrasts and shades of grey that happen between them, and symmetries and asymmetries. They photographed mass produced objects, a relative novelty at the time, while often aiming to conceal their true nature, thus making them fetishised objects of desire. Like in concurrent veristic painting, these were curious still lifes of modernity. The photographers embraced the climate of fast change and accelerated progress, and in doing so they found beauty in common objects. Moreover, their new approach involved extreme close-ups and contrasting effects that enabled high levels of visual stylisation. In a way, they were taking ordinary things they photographed out of the wider context. That manner became also very useful in the growing advertising industry of the 1920s and 1930s, for the fetishisation of objects is the alpha and omega of commercial propaganda. The principles of modern photography or new photography soon became appropriated by the world of advertising.

This progress was unravelling amidst very unstable and turbulent times; in Europe, the trauma of World War I was not completely healed and post-war political and economic instabilities were still not over. In 1929, the stock market crash took place in the USA and was followed by the Great Depression that impoverished millions of people across the globe, and in Europe there were increasing concerns about the growing radicalisation of political regimes in a number of states. The progress, powered by the technological and scientific big leap forward, which many saw as a solution for social unrest, was crippled by these crises, but the genie was out of the bottle. Despite the overall instability, the idea of modernity was inevitably present. Photography and film were at the forefront of the radical transformation of visual culture, mass media and everyday life.

In his influential book Painting, Photography, Film (1925) László Moholy-Nagy wrote in favour of new photography stating that “exact mechanical procedures of photography and the film work incomparably better than did the manual procedures of the representational painting. From now on painting can concern itself with pure colour composition.” He continued that “photography when used as a representational art is not a mere copy of nature. This is proved by the rarity of the ‘good’ photograph. Only now and then does one find really ‘good’ photographs among the millions which appear in illustrated papers and books. What is remarkable in this and at the same time serves as proof is that we always infallibly and with sure instinct discover the ‘good’ photographs, quite apart from the novelty or unfamiliarity of the ‘thematic’ content.”

In 1929, the most influential exhibition of modern photography took place in Stuttgart, Germany, entitled Film und Foto: Internationale Ausstellung des Deutschen Werkbunds (FiFo) which then travelled to several European cities. This groundbreaking showcase of the new mediums glorified modernity and the new veristic expression of photography and film. As a supplement to the exhibition, the one-off magazine Foto Auge, with a foreword by the theorist, critic and photographer Franz Roh, was published and widely distributed. In the essay, translated in three languages, German, French and English, Roh pointed out some of the features of new photography.

Roh wanted to emphasize the significance of the change that took place with the transformation from idealised pictorialism to veristic modernism: “Next to a new world of objects we find the old seen anew. Here the difference in degree of intensifying plasticity becomes pictorial means. For a long time, we had photographers who clad everything in twilight. Today everything is brought out clearly. Yet herein recipes are not admitted, and occasionally the palpably plastic may be put next to the optically flowing, whereby new effects are gained in pictures which the narrow intellect of the professional is inclined to point to as failures.” Furthermore, he pointed out the importance of a new photographic aesthetic by claiming that “the audacious sight from above and below, which new technological achievement has brought about by sudden change of level, has not been utilised sufficiently for pictorial purposes so far.”

He also noticed how the old corporativist economic model had managed to utilise the modern expression of photography for its own benefit, in the fast-growing advertising industry. In a way, despite the ongoing class war of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Roh claimed that photography works universally for different strata of society; he noticed that “photography serves the capitalistic upper classes by its steadily increasing insertion into advertisement. By a photograph we can gain a more accurate notion of the articles offered than by ever so suggestive a drawing. On the other hand the camera supplies a want for the lower classes: for we often meet a common man on a Sunday excursion attempting to fix an incident on his holiday experience.”

One could thus claim that the 1920s and 1930s were a pivotal period for the development of a new visual culture which underwent fundamental changes, on a technological and ideological level, but it was also groundbreaking due the appearance of the first profound theoretical texts on the history of photography. One of the most prominent voices of modern art and visual culture was Walter Benjamin who, in his seminal essay A Little History of Photography (1931), wrote about the new vision of artists and photographers, as well as the penetration of creative photography which is ignorant of the wider sociopolitical context of an image. He assumed that creative photography “unmasked the posture of a photography that can endow any soup can with cosmic significance but cannot grasp a single one of the human connections in which it exists, even when this photography’s most dream-laden subjects are a forerunner more of its salability than of any knowledge it might produce. But because the true face of this kind of photographic creativity is the advertisement or association, its logical counterpart is the act of unmasking or construction.”

Despite its new-found autonomy, new photography of the 1920s and 1930s was still existentially dependant on other forms of art, namely architecture. New urbanism, modern architecture and industrial design were the crucial prerequisites of modern photography. Something has to already exist in order to be photographed. But what were the things that became crucial conventions of modernism in photography? The first and foremost was the use of black and white photography even though, by the 1930s, colour photography was available and increasingly used in commercial contexts such as advertisement and lifestyle magazines; the unwritten rule that serious photography, be it in artistic or pure documentary contexts, is always black and white persisted all the way into the 1960s and 1970s.

Furthermore, modern photography brought about a number of compositional conventions where the industrial world of objects became crucial features. The modern photographers often created studio conditions with artificial lights in order to make ambivalent images that were not directly representational; commonly they made idealised close-ups of ordinary things, stylised images of shirt collars, kitchen pots or tree branches, that represented the objective reflection of modern reality. The widespread style of new objectivity introduced tendencies in which photographers resorted to still lifes in controlled, well-lit, artificial environments, producing high contrast and almost abstract images. Furthermore, the dramatic angles showing irregular lines of modern structures, which seemed like taking fragments of reality out of their original context in order to point out the rules of the mechanical and technological world, became a blueprint of avant-garde and constructivist photography. The “new photography” is therefore a common name for many various styles and movements but the common denominator was the aesthetic of modernity. And these conventions and aesthetics remain partially topical to this day, despite the fact that the technology, ideology and overall culture has changed significantly in the past century.

What has definitely changed is the vision of photography as an autonomous visual medium that found its comfortable space for presentation and distribution in the mass (printed) media, and rejected the world of art for its elitism and artifice. Nowadays, contemporary photography has been an integral part of contemporary art (and its market) and, therefore, photography is again trying to follow dominant tendencies in visual art; works of contemporary photography often aim to enter physical space, to become an installation or a process. Photography that is made for artistic contexts, for gallery presentation, is increasingly merged with other artistic mediums, which undoubtedly corresponds with the current postmodern culture and Zeitgeist. But even the new expressions of photography, which are much more fluid, interdisciplinary and open than ever before, are still shaped by rules, formulas and conventions that may not be obvious now but might become apparent when this day and age finally becomes historically distant enough to recognise them.

Miha Colner, © October 2024