Here Comes the New Photography!

These words sum up many of the characteristics of the New Photography which flourished in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. It also influenced photographers in such countries as the United States, Great Britain and Australia.

The New Photography was not the product of a unified movement with a single intention and style. It comprised a range of photographic responses to a variety of social, technological and aesthetic factors. It had its origins in the USSR and Germany soon after World War l, the event which finally closed the door on the nineteenth century and set the stage for the twentieth.

The USSR had just been transformed by a people's revolution and Germany seemed on the brink of another. A new social order demanded a new art, no longer the symbolism or expressionism of the pre-war and pre-revolution years but an art based on the possibilities of technological advance combined with socialism. This new art was to extend and change the perception of the world itself.

In the USSR artists embraced the new modes of perception opened up by modern technology. Constructivists modelled their work on the clean, efficient forms of the machine. Suprematist painting emphasized purity of form, surface and colour. The design of utilitarian objects became streamlined and more purely functional.

Victor Shklovsky, the pre-revolutionary Russian Futurist, developed an important concept for photographers and film-makers of the period; ostranenie, 'making strange'. By presenting objects and events in strange or unfamiliar ways the spontaneous act of routine recognition was to be delayed, stimulating a new way of seeing, a revolutionized perception.

Other equally revolutionary concepts for photography and film-making were montage and collage. In these processes two or more disparate images were juxtaposed, the pictorial contradictions creating both a new image and an additional meaning.

Alexander Rodchenko renounced his training as a painter in 1921 to become a photographer and designer. He celebrated the new pictorial freedom facilitated by faster films and smaller cameras (such as the Leica and Ermanox) and also drew attention to the act of looking itself by the use of extreme upward and downward looking camera angles. Such camera angles became one of the characteristics of the New Photography all over the world. Rodchenko also experimented with photomontage, creating graphically striking and politically didactic book and magazine covers.

The photographers, film-makers and painters of the USSR had a close relationship with their German contemporaries, who were also fascinated by the possibilities of social and technological change. In Germany the New Photography was part of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement of the mid-1920s which reacted against expressionism in painting and pictorialism in photography. New Objectivity in photography emphasized uniquely photographic qualities, offering clear, sharp, unencumbered views of reality. These were intended to reveal the essential nature of objects, 'the thing in itself', in the phrase of the nineteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Albert Renger-Patzsch, in his important book The World is Beautiful (1928), extensively documented a variety of natural and industrial objects from the conventionally mundane to the spectacular, giving them equal value and beauty. (The pre-publication title of the book was simply 'Things'.) Renger-Patzsch described the book in 1937 as 'an alphabet, intended to demonstrate how pictorial problems can be solved by purely photographic means.'

The work of Karl Blossfeldt and Ernst Fuhrmann similarly related natural to mechanical forms, lending them a sense of functional unity. Significantly, though, Fuhrmann's plant photographs are also suggestive of a vital, potentially sinister life-force in nature, an extension of nineteenth-century German Romantic traditions.

Portraiture became direct and confrontational, clean and sharp, and tended to emphasize close-ups. Photographers eschewed prevailing portrait conventions in the pursuit of a supposedly objective and therefore social truth. The work of photographers like Umbo, who worked extensively in Berlin, reflects a metropolitan taste for daring theatre and music, including jazz.

August Sander developed an ambitious portrait series, People of the Twentieth Century, in the 1920s. He set out to record and classify the entire range of German society, treating his subjects not just as individuals but as representative types. His documentary intention contrasts with Renger-Patzsch's formalism. Less overtly politicized but more formally radical were portraits by Umbo and Yva.

With the establishment of arts, crafts and design schools in Germany, such as the influential Bauhaus set up at Weimar in 1919, attention began to shift from the possibilities of social change through photography to photography for its own sake. Photographers such as László Moholy-Nagy experimented with the camera as a means of using light to produce photograms, solarizations and abstract photographs. The resultant images, including photograms by the artist Man Ray, often assumed surreal overtones, a further input into the New Photography.

Increasingly, graduates from design schools, such as Gyorgy Kepes and Piet Zwart, found work in commercial advertising and fashion illustration. The once revolutionary photography was becoming simply ‘the modern look’, characterized by bold, geometric forms, dramatic lighting, flattened spaces and strong aggressive lines. It was largely at this level that modernist photography began to be disseminated outside Europe. In the form of book and magazine illustrations it was widely accepted in such countries as the United States, Great Britain and Australia. Exhibitions also helped to bring the New Photography to a wider audience. Film und Foto, (referred to as ‘Fifo’), held in Stuttgart in 1929, was the first large-scale exhibition of international modernist photography.

The United States, too, had a strong tradition of modernist photography by the 1930s. This tradition, in part, grew out of the Photo-Secession, a group of progressive pictorialist photographers led by Alfred Stieglitz which was prominent in the early part of the twentieth century. Edward Steichen, a member of the Photo-Secession and a leading photographer since the turn of the century, used the vital shapes and lines of the New Photography in his work for Vogue magazine in the 1920s and 1930s. The new approach received further impetus with the emigration of Moholy-Nagy to Chicago in 1937, where he was joined by Gyorgy Kepes.

Edward Weston, joint American co-ordinator (with Steichen) for the Film und Foto exhibition, was one of the foremost figures of American modernist photography. His clear, strongly composed and finely printed photographs of natural forms have much in common with the German New Objectivity, evincing an almost mystical faith in the power of 'the thing in itself' and the potential of photography to reveal that power.

Several Australian photographers were significantly influenced by the New Photography. Max Dupain drew on both the formalist and surreal strands of the movement. His debt to photographers like Renger-Patzsch is clear; and in 1936 he reviewed a book by Man Ray in The Home magazine, publishing photographs closely modelled on his in the next issue. Olive Cotton spent several years working in Dupain's studio from 1934 and was similarly influenced. Wolfgang Sievers, a leading Australian industrial photographer, trained at a Berlin school of applied arts before emigrating in 1938.

By the 1940s the New Photography had profoundly affected the visual culture of its time, although the social objectives which provided its original motivation remained largely unrealized. It was a crucial input into the development of photography both as an art form and a commercial practice during the inter-war years and beyond.