Seealso:Museums: Europe
Further Reading
Moderna Museet/Modern Museum. London: Scala Books,
1998.
Sidwall, Ake, and Leif Wigh.Ba ̈ckstro ̈ms Bilder! The Hel-
mer Ba ̈ckstro ̈m Collection in Fotografiska Museet. Stock-
holm: Fotografiska Museet, 1980.
Wigh, Leif.Blandande Bilder/New Trends and Young Photo-
graphy in Sweden. Stockholm: Fotografiska Museet,
1981.
———.‘‘Zum Museum fu ̈r Photographie.’’ Moderna
Museet Stockholm. Bonn: Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle
der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1996.
———. ‘‘You’ve Got to Be Modernistic.’’Utopia & Reality:
Modernity in Sweden 1900–1960. New Haven/New York:
Yale Press and Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the
Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, 2002.
———. ‘‘Helmut Gernsheim and His Photographic Collec-
tion in Sweden.’’Helmut Gernsheim: Pioneer of Photo-
history. Mannheim: Forum Internationale Photographie
der Reiss-Engelhorn-Museum, 2003.
———.Anna Riwkin: Portrait of a Photographer. Stock-
holm: Moderna Museet, 2004.MODERNISM
The term ‘‘modernism’’ loosely describes a vast and
dynamic field of cultural and aesthetic innovation
that emerged in the first decades of the twentieth
century. A response to the industrialization and
mechanization that shaped Western culture in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, modernism
first announced its innovations through painting
and literature. James Joyce’sPortrait of the Artist
as a Young Man(1916) slices the novel into distinct
literary styles, experiments with the fluidity of lan-
guage, and suspends narrative time to represent the
vicissitudes of subjective experience and percep-
tion. Marcel Duchamp’sNude Descending a Stair-
case No. 2(1912) (the Armory show’ssucce ́sde
scandale) triumphantly culminates the fragmenta-
tion, analysis, and multiplication of perspectives
variously explored by impressionist, post-impres-
sionist, and Cubist painters.
Although photography was associated with mod-
ernity’s technological inventions and had become
the defining feature of mass visual culture, it had a
somewhat late and an unsettled place in modern-
ism. And yet even though photography came late to
the scene as a medium in which modernism was
expressed, it had informed literature and painting’s
innovations. Modern artists working in every med-
ium were compelled by the camera’s capacity to
represent what Walter Benjamin later described in
‘‘A Short History of Photography’’ (1931), as the
‘‘optical unconscious’’—that which the physical eye
cannot see. Duchamp’sNude Descending a Stair-
case No. 2, which arrests and depicts motion’s min-
ute fragments in painterly shards, could not have
appeared in a culture bereft of photography’s deep-
ening and expanding of vision’s capacities.
While photographic vision informed Futurism,
Surrealism, and Dada’s dismantling of aesthetic hier-
archies, it was these fine arts movements that helped
to break open photography’s experimental paths. It
is particularly the Dadaist use of montage, which
cuts photographs from their original contexts and
then juxtaposes them with text and typography, that
calls attention to the image as sign, and therefore
undermines the assumption that the photograph ren-
ders a positivistic truth. The deconstruction of the
photographic image is in tension with, but not
wholly unrelated to, another impulse in modernist
photography: exploring the photograph’s unique
capacity to represent traces of the material real,
what Rosalind Krauss describes as the photograph’s
indexical relation to that which it depicts. Many
modern photographs, particularly those that veer
toward abstraction, are explorations of and medita-
tions on the limits and possibilities of the photo-
graphic medium. Man Ray’s ‘‘rayographs’’ and
La ́szlo ́ Moholy-Nagy’s ‘‘photograms,’’ cameraless
images produced from placing and exposing objects
on light-sensitive paper, as well as Alfred Langdon
Coburn’s Vortographs, kaleidoscopic compositions
of mirrored light and shadow, are just a few of
modernist photographers’ attempts to discover the
fundamental qualities of the photograph.
Reflecting on the unique capacities of the photo-
graph and defamiliarizing perspectival form became
two interrelated tropes for exploring photography’s
visual language. Looking at her own image in aMODERNA MUSEET