THEIRISEXPERIENCE: Modernism and Photography

Pablo Picasso - Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Modernism

The term describes the modernist movement in the arts, its set of cultural tendencies and associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In particular the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by the horror of World War I, were among the factors that shaped Modernism.

La ratlla verda -Henri Matisse - 1905)

La place de L'odeon - Morgan Russell

Characteristically, modernist art has a tendency to abstraction, is innovative, aesthetic, futuristic and self-referential. It includes visual art, literature, music, film, design, architecture as well as life style. It reacts against historicism, artistic conventions and institutionalization of art. Art was not only to be dealt with in academies, theaters or concert halls, but to be included in everyday life and accessible for everybody.

MODERN PHOTOGRAPHY

A general term used to encompass trends in photography from roughly 1910-1950 when photographers began to produce works with a sharp focus and an emphasis on formal qualities, exploiting, rather than obscuring, the camera as an essentially mechanical and technological tool.

Wall Street - Paul Strand - 1915

Florence Henri - Street scene with a woman - 1931

This approach abandoned the Pictorialist mode that had dominated the medium for over 50 years throughout the United States, Latin America, Africa, and Europe. Critic Sadakichi Hartmann’s 1904 “Plea for a Straight Photography” heralded this new approach, rejecting the artistic manipulations, soft focus, and painterly quality of Pictorialism and praising the straightforward, unadulterated images of modern life in the work of artists such as Alfred Stieglitz.

Edward Weston - Leaves of Grass - 1941

Innovators like Paul Strand and Edward Weston would further expand the artistic capabilities and techniques of photography, helping to establish it as an independent art form.