avant-gardism of La ́szlo ́Moholy-Nagy, Alexander
Rodchenko, and others.
Straight Photography sought to seize an objec-
tive reality made of everyday objects that usually
escape the human eye. Without any manipulation
and by emphasizing purely photographic processes
such as framing, lighting, focus, scale, or viewpoint,
the resulting images exploited the pure formalism
of flattened and two-dimensional patterns, geome-
try, and design. This trend was well illustrated in
America with Bernard Shea Horne, Max Weber
and their students of Clarence H. White School of
Photography in the 1910s, in Charles Sheeler’s
House Of Doylestown, Staircase (1917), in Stie-
glitz’s seriesEquivalentsin 1923–1931, and in Sis-
kind’s later work of the 1930s and 1940s. A related
strain of the Americanists’ Straight Photography
materialized with the New Vision (Neue Sehen) in
Germany and Russia whose prominent representa-
tives were Moholy-Nagy (From the Radio Tower Ber-
lin, 1928) and Rodschenko (On The Pavement, 1928).
Even more experimental or aesthetically radical
than the work of the aforementioned Straight pho-
tographers was another strain of abstraction that
considered photography as an ideal means of plas-
tic expression to build and create new visual codes.
Using a diversity of practices such as the photo-
gram, manipulation of light, movement and chem-
istry, European photographers realized a range of
recurrent features that became associated with mod-
ernist abstraction. Because the photogram was pro-
duced without a camera, the artist could create
images from shadows and silhouettes of objects
that were placed between the light source and
light-sensitive paper or film, thus bypassing the
mechanical or technical apparatus in favor of ima-
gination and even surrealism.
At the origins of numerous abstract manipula-
tions, the photogram became one of the most
enduring techniques of the century, finding practi-
tioners in Christian Schad as early as 1918, Man
Ray in 1921, and Moholy-Nagy in 1922. Exempli-
fying Dadaist and Constructivist preoccupations,
photogram processes allowed the exploration of
photography’s profound nature by exploiting the
play of texture, pattern, transparency, and the dua-
lity of positive-negative relationships. The process
permitted many possibilities such as experimenta-
tion with dematerialization, the interpenetration of
forms, distortion and lack of perspective. Various
artists such as Theodore Roszak, Georg Zimin,
Piet Zwart, and Willy Zielke made photograms in
the 1930s; Bronislaw Schlabs, Julien Coulommier,
Andrzej Pawlowski, Beksinki and Kurt Wendlandt
in the 1940s and 1950s; Lina Kolarova, Rene ́
Ma ̈chler, and Andreas Mulas in the 1970s; Tomy
Ceballos, Kare Magnole, Andreas Mu ̈ller-Pohle,
and Floris M. Neusu ̈ss have utilized the process in
the 1980s.
Equally important among abstract practices, the
use of light remains a fundamental principle with
the function not only to reveal and make visible,
but also to be exploited as a real material. In this
respect, several trajectories can be traced, including
the pictures of lighted surfaces or volumes in Fran-
cis Bruguie`re’sLight Abstractions(1919) and Jar-
omir Funke’sLight Abstraction, Rectanglesin the
1920s. Between the 1930s and the 1950s photogra-
phers such as Moholy-Nagy with hisLight Modu-
lator‘‘machines,’’ Barbara Morgan seized upon
luminous flow, whether fixed or in motion, to pro-
duce calligraphic expression. More recently in
France, Thomas Reaume in the 1980s and Bernard
Lanteri in the 1990s have realized luminous and
fluid forms that defy the fixed nature of the photo-
graphic image.
Movement and blurredness represent another
aspect of abstraction in photography. This ten-
dency is illustrated by the works of Italian futurists
such as the brothers Arturo and Antonin Braga-
glia’s photodynamism and aerial photography by
Fedele Azari and Filippo Masoero, in addition to
the kineticism of German photographers Oskar
Schlemmer, Peter Keetman and Otto Steinert in
the 1940s–1950s. Generally, these works fit an aes-
thetic of speed and movement linked to the expres-
sions of the artistic avant-garde of the time. But it
is only by the 1950s that an aesthetic of blurred-
ness, movement, and random quality peculiar to
photography found expression. As such, it seemed
that American William Klein’s work was as much
a beginning and a major reference for contempo-
rary photographers such as Gerard Dalla-Santa,
Frederic Gallier, Herve ́Rabot, Patrick Toth, and
Mu ̈ller-Pohle who during the 1980s viewed move-
ment not only as a transcription of the urban
world’s brutal dynamism but also as a mine of
pure form, revealing the visual and tactile qualities
of photography (for example, grain).
Finally, choosing to relinquish the optical as-
pect of the medium, another group of photogra-
phers preferred to explore the medium’s physical
chemistry. Relying on darkroom experimentation
and camera-less imagery, photographers explored
the abstract qualities possible in chemical experi-
mentation, leading to the specific forms of Ed-
mund Kesting and Chargesheimer in the 1940s,
and Stryj Piasecki or Pierre Cordier in the 1950s.
Sigmar Polke during the 1970s and Riwan Tro-
meur during the 1980s have produced a peculiarABSTRACTION