ope. Weston and Strand, as well as Stieglitz, paid
great attention to the making and the selecting of
their prints conceived as real and unique art objects.
Its roots are no doubt numerous—in American
machinism, maybe even in a certain conception of
the work ethic—but can be easily ascribed to the
autonomization of the medium.
The most direct exponent of Stieglitz’s theory
well into the century was probably Paul Strand
(1890–1976), whose pictures were featured in the
last issue ofCamera Workin 1917, for many mark-
ing the break in America with the outmoded Pic-
torialist style. He developed Stieglitz’s concept of
straight photographic practice and was probably as
adamant about it. He was also a fierce critic of
Materialism and of an American society caught in
the ideology of the machine and of science (‘‘Photo-
graphy and the New God,’’ Broom, 1922). He
wanted to substitute for it a society where contem-
plation and its main player, the artist, would bring a
fully human dimension to life. In that respect,
although his philosophy was very similar to that
of Stieglitz or Weston, his photography, from the
early modernist studies of fences (1917) or his
famousBlind(1916) to the portraits of peasants
and common people, and his numerous images of
buildings in the United States and abroad, show a
much greater human concern.
His friend and partner on a short film venture,
Manhatta(1921), Charles Sheeler (1883–1965), had
fewer qualms as regards industrial power and tech-
nology. His images of the Ford Plant at River
Rouge (1927) or of the deck of an ocean liner
(1929), of a steam locomotive (1939), or of a turbine
(1939), that he treated both as a painter and as a
photographer, are clear manifestations of a form of
industrial sublime (Davis 153). The line is thin
between the complex work of Sheeler and the multi-
tude of images by lesser known although no less
competent photographers who displayed a fascina-
tion for the machine age. Machines, cars, tools,
industrial buildings, factories, and bridges, were
the heroes of the age, and found their zealots
beyond the walls of the gallery in photographer-
star Margaret Bourke-White and in publications
such as Henry Luce’sFortune.
Photographic life was active in the United States
in that period—witness regular exhibitions (Davis
130–131) and the activities of camera clubs. Pictori-
alism was largely dead by the 1920s but would not
completely disappear and in fact would merge quite
easily with the ‘‘documentary’’ aesthetic of the
1940s (‘‘humanistic photography’’ as it was some-
times called). Quite clearly, however, American
photography was, by then, developing its ownsui
generisform of New Objectivity.
Walker Evans best exemplified the invention of this
American form of photographic realism. His first
images, made on his return from Paris (1927) and in
Cuba (1933), display an essential modernistic style
that makes them comparable with those of contem-
porary German and central European photographers.
Form, and the multitudes of surprises and ‘‘puns’’
allowed by the city environment, were essential in
those early photographs. Evans, however, by the
time he was hired by the photographic department
(historical section) of the Resettlement Administration
(later Farm Security Administration), had moved
towards a more comprehensive vision. Subjects
appear more clearly in their entirety and tended to
draw the spectator towards their existence, more than
towards the photographer’s choice. Focusing on the
vernacular architecture and folk art with a penchant
for the old and dilapidated and photographed with a
large view camera (up to 810-inch), Evans devel-
oped a melancholy—or at least interrogative—gaze
on the American scene, leading to the publication of
one of the most influential books of the decade,Amer-
ican Photographs(1938), which accompanied the first
solo photographer exhibition at the Museum of Mod-
ern Art, New York. Because of his association with a
government information agency and his work on con-
temporary subjects and scenes, Walker Evans has
long been discussed in terms of the documentary
nature and function of his images. The debate is
particularly sterile in his case. Indeed, together with
Sheeler and Strand, Evans may be seen as bridging in
photography the gap between art and society: neither
commenting upon the latter (whether positively as
commercial photographers do, or more negatively as
documentary or press photographers), nor evading it
(as Stieglitz), Evans defined a place and a stance, the
frontal gaze, at the same time committed with its
bodily presence but also detached, neither participant,
nor observer. This proposition was to characterize
much of American photography in the years to come.The Human Condition
The decades that saw the development of totalitar-
ian regimes on the failures of exhausted monarchies
and imperial systems, and that experienced a mere
decade later, a massive, global, and apparently end-
less recession that undermined the very pillars of
democracy, could not remain blind to the role and
vision of the artist in society. Simultaneously, poli-
ticians became aware of the possibilities of the
medium in furthering their agenda, be it liberal asHISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: INTERWAR YEARS