Photography and the 1920s

In the 19th century, the dialectic of the history of photography was the interaction between photography as an emerging business and photography as a medium of art; within this dialectic, priorities were given to the scientific, factual or documentary aspects of photography by one side and to the “aesthetic,” moralizing or allegorical, and pictorial aspects by the other.
    The 20th century dialectic changes in large part because the accessibility of photography changes and in part because the issues in the art world change.  Photography becomes a tool of mass or popular culture at the same time that it begins to realize its capacity as an artistic medium.  This interaction between the mass medium and the art medium is the one which exerted the greatest impact on the directions of twentieth century photography.  The movements which dominated the culture of high art were critical to the history of photography in the sense that they comprise some of the influences which come to photography from the “high art” side of the dialectic.  In other words, photography did not simply develop in response to cubism, futurism, surrealism, or any other movement in art; it did, however, incorporate some of these developments in a more generic and individualized manner as photographers continued to try to define their medium as something different from yet equal to other art media, and to reject the notion of artistic photography as something which looked like a painting.
    In the following overview of modern styles of painting, I have rather arbitarily (in some cases) matched photographs to the style.  My reason for doing so is two-fold: first, to demonstrate that one of the more important developments of photography at this time is its "refusal" to try to look like painting, a factor which makes it far more difficult to align a modern photograph with an art movement than it seemd to be in the case of pictorialist photographs. In many cases, the influences on a single photograph are multiple, not only in terms of style but in terms of a complex of technological, stylistic, and sociological factors.  Second, sheer provocation: use my choices as a jumping off point for discussion.
 

A Selective Overview of Early 20th Century Styles

I. Expressionism: Die Brucke (the Bridge) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider)

The term was first used to describe the expression of strong emotions in art; then it was used to designate a particular German form of art which emerged before and during World War I.  A specific rejection of the impressionist focus on the effects of light, the expressionists made their focus the depiction of a personal, interior response to the world. This subjective response does suggest a strong relationship to the symbolist movement if we recognize that the expressionists, unlike the symbolists, are not depicting mythological, literary or fantastical images of the world.  The expressionists remain rooted in the real world although their response to it seems to be one which leads to paintings which place distortion above an objective depiction of the world.  In particular, it seems to be an emotional response to urbanism and a world which is believed to be in a state of decadence and decline.  The Bridge artists, unlike the Blue Rider artists, remain closer to the real world in terms of their subject but they mediate the subject through technique, while artists in the second group seem to take their subject from an interior spiritual state.  But in the case of expressionism, the role of color and subjectivity is so important that the binary distinction is less useful in terms of technique than in terms of subject matter.  The influences on photography of the 1920s may be less apparent in visual terms than content and in the belief that the artist/photographer was not documenting the urban conditions he or she lived in so much as identifying these conditions and holding them up for public view.
 
?Max Beckmann: The Night, 1918 Ludwig Kirchner: Street in Berlin, 1913
Kandinsky: Composition VII, 1913
Berenice Abbott: James Joyce, 1928 (aesthete or social critic?) Witkiewicz: Self-portrait, 1912 (symbolist or expressionist angst?)
Rodchenko: Fire Escape (from the series: The Building on Miasnitskaia St., 1925) Francis Joseph Bruguiere: Cut Paper, 1928---the greatest abstraction is the greatest realism (Kandinsky)?

2. Cubism

Unlike symbolism, fauvism, and expressionism, cubism rejects the interiority of the artist as a source for the art work; at the same time, it rejects the naturalism of realism and accepts the symbolist interest in art as a visual language.  Cubism rejects renaissance perspective, and it rejects the idea of the art work as a representation of some reality that exists outside of the art work.  In this respect, the cubist work of art becomes a new reality; it represents itself (as one writer says, the essence of cubism was to "make of each picture a new tangible reality rather than an illusion of some imaginary reality or an image of a purely visual sensation of reality").  Its focus on the "language" of art has direct implications for photography as does the belief that the cubist vision is a new vision, one which reveals many facets of the object at the same time.  The form of cubism which is probably most directly influential to photographers is precisionism.

2 examples of "true" cubism:

Braque: The Portuguese, 1911  Picasso: Ma Jolie, 1911-12

Many artists use cubist ideas shortly after encountering the work of Picasso and Braque although they do not use them in the same way [Metzinger, Gleizes, Delaunay, Leger, Gris, Malevich.]

(synthetic cubism) Picasso: Still Life with Compotier, 1914-15 (oil on canvas)
Charles Demuth: My Egypt, 1927 (precisionism) Charles Sheeler: Upper Deck, 1929
Steichen: Maypole, 1932 Paul Strand: Akeley Camera, 1922
Imogen Cunningham: Triangles, 1928 Sheeler: untitled, 1927

3. Futurism and Rayism

Futurism was an art which rejects traditional political and cultural values; it insists on experiencing the present in terms of speed, movement, dynamism; modern life should be the subject.  Instead of the cubist fragmentation of an object, the focus in futurism is on "force lines" and the vibrations of movement.  The influence on photography may be seen in terms of the subject and the way the subject is represented.
Rayism is in some respects the Russian version of futurism.  Unlike Italian futurism, its emphasis has much less to do with modern life than it has to do with rays of light.  For Larionov and Goncharova, the key practitioners of this style, the goal is the depiction of the rays of force and light emitted by an object.
 
Umberto Boccioni: Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 Boccioni: The Dynamism of the Cyclist, 1913

 
Man Ray, untitled rayograph, 1923-8 Rodchenko: Shevchenko, 1924

5. Suprematism

Developed by Malevich, this movement asserts the "supremacy" of the plane (rectangle or square) of color.  The black square is the first suprematist painting, and Malevich refers to it as the "zero" of form, from which all creation will then emerge.  The goal of this movement is transcendence of the logical world, to reach the fourth dimension.  Although suprematist painting does not appear to be directly relevant to modernist developments in photography, some of the important Russian photographers and graphic artists of the 1920s had mixed origins in both suprematism and constructivism.  The roots of El Lissitsky, a Russian artist who makes some of his most important contributions at the Bauhaus, undeniably lay in suprematism.  But his work as a graphic artist takes in a direction that also undeniably is quite different from that of Malevich or Rozanova.
 
Kasimir Malevich: Suprematist Painting, 1917-18 Olga Rozanova: Green Stripe (color painting), 1917
El Lissitsky: Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1920 (lithograph)
Andre Kertesz: M?ontmartre, 1927 Rodc?henko: Pine Trees, Pushkino, 1927

6. Constructivism

Constructivism was a Russian post-revolutionary movement expressed in stage design, architecture, and graphics primarily, and to a much lesser extent in painting.  The movement was dominated by a goal of expressing the properties of the materials used and a goal of efficacy or the fulfillment of social and aesthetic goals in an efficient manner.  A critical part of constructivism was the belief that the viewer of the work of art had to be engaged in producing its meaning, that the active mental involvement of the spectator was a model for the active involvement of the new Russian citizen.  Rodchenko, in true constructivist fashion, applied the same ideas of efficacious and revolutionary design to all the media he worked in, from furniture design to graphics to photography.
 
Liubov Popova: model of stage set for the Magnanimous Cuckold, 1922 Rodchenko: Kino-glaz (Cine-eye), maquette for a poster for a film by Dziga Vertov, 1924 (lithograph)

7. Surrealism

The goal of surrealism is the expression of the true functioning of the mind, through such means as dream imagery, the act of drawing in a manner that is not consciously directed (psychic automatism), fantastic imagery, art that is not censored by the conscious mind.  Some surrealism is dominated by automatist practices; some surrealism uses illusionary techniques and depicts dream-like or "otherworldly" objects and events.
 
Dali: The Birth of Liquid Desires, 1931/2 Matta: Disasters of Mysticism, 1942
Herbert Bayer, Lonely Metropolis, 1932 Man Ray: The Primacy of Matter over Thought, 1929 

Photography's early development and progress were substantially the same in Europe and the U.S., with the U.S. in some cases taking the lead because there was no established tradition of art to compete with it.  This changed dramatically after the first World War for social and technological reasons: the avant-garde in art was located in Europe and to the extent that art photography continued to respond to developments in other media, European art was outpacing American to an extent that could not be ignored.  To some degree, this had to do with the relatively late involvement of the United States in W.W. I and to an even larger degree, with the fact that the war was fought on European soil.  The pull on photography and all the arts to respond to world events was therefore stronger in Europe, whether the photographer was committed to mass culture or to high culture.  In both the U.S. and Europe, the division between high and low art, or fine art and mass culture, was rapidly becoming untenable, and it was the goal of using art (whether by choice or by decree) as a means of communicating revolutionary messages, through form as much as through meaning, that drove the radical developments of photographers in Germany and U.S.S.R.
A similar set of technological conditions affected both Europe and America.  Cameras were smaller, handheld, and had larger lenses, all of which facilitated faster picture-taking times.  As camera use became more flexible and adaptable to a wider range of conditions, film became more sensitive.  Accompanying these changes was the development and invention of artificial lighting systems, culminating in 1925 in the glass vacuum flash bulb.  Concomitant with these changes, the prices of metals such as platinum and palladium were becoming too high for the continued use of printing papers which contained these materials.  The switch to the cheaper silver was not insignificant because printing on silver papers produced images with a much higher contrast.
    In conjunction with these changes, another set of technological changes was affecting the place of the illustration in print media.  When it became possible to reproduce a photograph in a paper medium, without making an etching of it and therefore making it into something which did not have the tonal variation and range of a photograph, and when the technology for reproducing newspapers and magazines improved to the point of allowing for large, multiple runs, the photograph could reach large audiences quickly and cheaply, and it could do this in the context of print.  Rather than standing alone as a self-contained illustration, the image, whether photograph or something else, was beginning to play a more important part in the magazine and periodical lay-out, in some cases becoming more important than the text while in other cases, entering into a new union of word and image that had substantial impact on the development of all media.   For photography, the impact was felt not only in terms of the ways in which the photograph could be combined with text but in terms of how the single photograph, unaligned with text and not intended for mass production, should define itself in terms of subject matter and form.
    One further development at the end of WWI had an undeniable impact on photography: film.  Although movies had existed before WWI, their popularity increased enormously after the war.  The montage effect of a film was probably the most striking influence of movies on photography, although it should be noted that some of the most radical film-makers were also photographers and undoubtedly developed comparable visual vocabularies in both media.