images of maximum detail, they softened their
prints by using soft-focus lenses and elaborate
printing processes.
Robert Demachy (1859–1936) was the
most famous representative of pictorialism in
France, while Edward steichen (1879–1973),
Frank Eugene (1865–1936), and Heinrich Kuhn
(1866–1936) were its most notable proponents
in the us, Germany, and Austria respectively.
There is a similarity in their approaches to the
female body, not only in the printing techniques
but also in their tendency to portray the model
in a dreamlike atmosphere. Their intention was
to represent nudity in its sublimated form to
make the viewer reflect upon the meaning of
the image rather than to stimulate desire.
PhotograPhy fiNds its directioN
By around 1910, the pictorialist goal of copying
the look and feel of paintings gave rise to a new
chapter in the history of photography. Reacting
against this nonphotographic approach, some
photographers turned toward what became
known as pure, or straight, photography: reality
itself became their subject rather than an
idealization or sublimation of it. Having found
recognition as art, photography had no need to
imitate painting any more.
The modernists photographed their subject
for its own merits and with techniques specific
to the photographic medium. The nude body
was presented now as an object in its own
right, used in a graphic way with a strong
interplay of lines and angles. For artists such as
the Austrian Rudolf Köppitz (1884–1936) and
the Czech František Drtikol (1883–1961) the
nude became a figure with which to create geometric and abstract
compositions that drew their influence from Cubism, although
they still used the soft printing techniques of the pictorialists.
Other photographers sought graphic qualities not only in their
compositions but also in the printing techniques.
In the 1920s the surrealist movement in visual art and literature
was born as a reaction against the rationalism in European culture
and politics that, the members of the movement believed, had
ultimately led to World War I. Influenced by Freud, the goal of the
surrealists was to blur the lines between the conscious and the
unconscious and to express the imagination as it was revealed in
dreams. The Frenchman André Breton (1896–1966) and his fellow
surrealists soon discovered the artistic possibilities inherent in
photography, especially in collages. In their work, the representation
of the body took on a mystery and a sense of eroticism. By using
the more radical effects that the medium offered—whether bird’s-
eye view and a short depth of field, or the use of mirrors and
darkroom techniques such as solarization—the body could be
presented in unfamiliar guises.
The Hungarian photographer André Kertész (1894–1985) used
fairground mirrors in his series Distortion to deform the female
body. In the us, Edward Weston (1886–1958) created images with
fragments of the body, often using an upward perspective, while
contemporaries such as Alfred stieglitz (1864–1946) and Imogen
Cunningham (1883–1976) combined geometry and abstraction with
a sense of eroticism in their photographs.photography finds its direction 17 André Kertész
The modernists sought to expand the limits of the
photographic medium. Distortion No. 60 (1933) was one
of a series in which Kertész played with mirror distortions,
transforming his models into abstract creatures.