vertical mirror that is held up against a bare wall by
two mirrored balls, Florence Henri’s austere and
sexually suggestiveSelf Portrait(1928) stages photo-
graphy’s geometries of reiteration. In many of his
photographs of young Parisian bohemians such as
Groupe joyeux au bal musette(1932) Brassaı ̈depicted
those in proximity to cafe mirrors, therefore present-
ing images of the photographed subjects as well as
their reflections. Writing about Brassaı ̈’s visual com-
mentary on the photograph’s capacity for ‘‘self
reflection,’’ Craig Owens argues in ‘‘Photography en
abyme’’ (1978) that the mirror’s doubling of the
subjects ‘‘functions as a reduced, internal image of
the photograph.’’ Even more compelling for reading
photography’s interpretative play are the images of
people only visible in the photograph through their
mirrored reflection.
In 1936, when Walter Benjamin published ‘‘The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’
he theorized and contextualized many European and
Russian photographers’ enthusiasms about photogra-
phy’s revolutionary potential. In the 1920s and 1930s,
photographers such as Alexandr Rodchenko and
La ́szlo ́Moholy-Nagy theorized and created a photo-
graphic practice called New Vision, and attempted to
enliven viewers experiencing modern life through
stagnant perceptual and aesthetic traditions. Using
smaller format cameras and unencumbered by the
need for tripods, Moholy-Nagy and Rodchenko
explored the perspectives offered by the modern
city—its high-rises and dramatic scales, its geometries
of contrast, its industrial patterns and textures—and
experimented with what Christopher Phillips des-
cribes as ‘‘the purposefully disorienting vantage
point’’ (1989). Moholy-Nagy’sBerlin Radio Tower
(1928) is shot from far above ground such that the
spaces, shadows, and objects below intersect into a
dense and abstract pattern, implicitly celebrating the
technological and industrial shaping of modern life.
Rodchenko’sSawmill, Piles of Wood(1931) depicts,
from far below, one moment in the process of carry-
ing and stacking plywood. Dynamically askew, Rod-
chenko’s photographs defamiliarized the habitual
human-centered perspectives, ‘‘shooting from the
belly button.’’ Defending his work against critics
who claimed his photographs indulged in distortion,
in ‘‘The Paths of Modern Photography’’ (1928) Rod-
chenko declares: ‘‘Photography—the new, rapid, con-
crete reflector of the world—should surely undertake
to show the world from all vantage points, and to
develop people’s capacity to see from all sides.’’
Modernism in photography can be rightly said to
have emerged in Europe in the avant-garde circles of
Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Paris, and Prague. In the
United States, paradoxically, Alfred Stieglitz essen-
tially kept photography in the past to establish its
‘‘modern’’ value as a fine-arts medium. Distressed
by the proliferation of photographs in mass culture
and the rise of the Kodak amateur, Stieglitz worked
to convince the world that photography’s aesthetic
stature could be raised to that of painting and draw-
ing largely by mimicking the accepted aesthetic qua-
lities of these mediums. Encouraged by an early
correspondence with the late nineteenth-century
naturalist photographer Peter Henry Emerson, and
armed with a wealth of new technical knowledge,
Stieglitz produced and promoted Pictorialist photo-
graphs—soft focus images of pastoral scenes thema-
tically and compositionally derived from nineteenth
century paintings. Between 1902 and 1907, Stieglitz
became American photography’s most influential
figure and established America’s first institutions
for art photography. With the Munich and Vienna
Secessions as its rebellious predecessors, Stieglitz
founded the Photo-Secession in 1902 to mark mod-
ern American photography’s break with its more
conservative past, personified by the Camera Club
of New York. His Gallery 291 displayed Pictorialist
photographs, and came to be the first American
venue to feature the drawings, paintings, and sculp-
ture of European modernism. The journalsCamera
Notes(1897–1902), and thenCamera Work(1902–
1917) focused on the photograph’s potential for
artistry and established standards of eloquence in
photographic reproduction. The work of Edward
Steichen, Gertrude Ka ̈sebier, Clarence White, and
Frank Eugene were regularly featured in these Stie-
glitz forums. These artists manipulated their photo-
graphs to Pictorialist perfection through attentive
printing, cropping, and retouching. Their elegantly
crafted platinum and gum bichromate prints dove-
tailed with the gauzy, soft, and reflective photo-
graphic effects and symbolist themes.
Around 1910, however, Stieglitz’s photographic
practice shifted from Pictorialist to so-called
‘‘straight’’ photography—images taken in the open
air with a rapid exposure and presented with a mini-
mum of cropping and other manipulation. Many of
Stieglitz’s straight photographs seem to formally
and thematically embody the liminal space between
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Photographs
such as From the Back Window(1915) have the
textured effects of weather and atmosphere—giving
them hazy chiaroscuro nostalgia—but are also
detached and compositionally abstract.
The abstract logic of Stieglitz’s straight photogra-
phy was developed in the late 1920s into the 1930s to
pristine extremes by Edward Weston’s sharp, inci-
sive, close-up photographs of gleaming organic
forms and Paul Strand’s austere and attentive photo-MODERNISM