work in different media may show an affinity even if
no direct interactions occur. Of course, often the
relationship is direct: twentieth-century photogra-
phers responded openly and reflectively to modern
art movements that are closely identified with paint-
ing, among them Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract
Expressionism, and Pop Art. Influences also carried
from photography to painting: for instance, the
chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey, who
used the camera to study sequences of movements,
influenced attempts by Futurist painters to depict
sensations of speed. Moreover there has never been
a single relationship between photography and paint-
ing; instead many different kinds of exchanges take
place at any historical moment. Even during the
heyday of straight photography, many photogra-
phers sought out expressive themes and symbolic
imagery that rejected any claims to objectivity. Stie-
glitz himself maintained that photographers have the
right to produce images that are personal expressions
rather than objective records, a point he demon-
strated in his series of evocative cloud photographs,
calledEquivalents, intended to communicate emo-
tional states.
Many photographers in the twentieth century
embraced techniques such as collage and montage
that contradicted the alleged purity of the medium,
building on the experiments in working with uncon-
ventional materials and mixing media undertaken
by avant-garde artists involved in Cubism, Con-
structivism, Dada, and Surrealism. Montage had
precedents in the nineteenth century, notably in
the allegorical compositions of Oscar Gustav Rej-
lander and Henry Peach Robinson, who combined
separate photographs to produce composite table-
aus. Typically, twentieth-century montages created
during the years between World Wars I and II
differed from these precedents because they are
not seamless final images adhering to the unified
space of linear perspective but instead are fractured
images in which cut-up and reassembled fragments
contrast with each other and retain their fragmen-
tary character. Collages and montages by such
artists as the German Dadaists Hannah Ho ̈ch and
Raoul Hausmann and Surrealist Max Ernst are not
easily categorized within either painting or photo-
graphy, but rather are a hybrid of both. The found
photographic images incorporated in collages and
montages widened the definition of fine-art materi-
als and challenged the traditional supremacy of
paint. Yet these figures were more readily accepted
as artists and their work discussed as equal to the
efforts by their contemporaries who painted or
sculpted, while ‘‘straight’’ photographers continued
to fight for artistic recognition.
Photography and Surrealism had a particularly
fruitful relationship among avant-garde art move-
ments. Surrealist photographers produced disorien-
tating, psychologically charged imagery by recording
peculiar objects or odd juxtapositions encountered
by accident in the real world, as well as through the
strange pairings of montage and other photographic
manipulations that enabled the creation of psycho-
logically charged images. Certain processes lend
themselves to the Surrealist production of images
that transpose the familiar into something strange
in dreamlike fashion, including double exposure,
solarization, and tone reversal through printing
negatives. Surrealism continued in photography
long after its momentum died down in painting, for
example, in the enigmatic montages of Jerry Uels-
mann from the 1960s on and the staged tableaus of
Joel-Peter Witkin beginning in the 1980s.
Despite the popular view that photography is
essentially a realistic medium, various twentieth-
century photographers, like their counterparts in
painting, explored abstraction. When Cubism
emerged in France before World War I, photogra-
phers immediately began to experiment with new
ways of treating forms and volumes as reductive
geometric shapes. The interest in geometric ab-
straction transcended a painting-photography dia-
lect and also involved sculpture, architecture, and
modern design. Artists involved in Russian Con-
structivism, including Alexandr Rodchenko, and in
the German Bauhaus, notably La ́szlo ́ Moholy-
Nagy, embraced photography as a truly modern
art that enabled new means of visual perception,
and that lent itself to a geometric style. Such artists
used techniques that promoted abstract effects
such as extreme close-ups, which make it difficult
to identify subject matter, and new angles of vision
such as views angled sharply up or down, which
suppress the horizon line, flatten space, and turn
the elements of a scene into a flat pattern. In
the United States, the landscapes of Laura Gilpin
and the advertising images of Edward Steichen
and Paul Outerbridge Jr. are a few of the many
photographs that used design concepts derived
from avant-garde movements associated with geo-
metric abstraction.
In the 1940s and 1950s, some art photographers
experimented with an intuitive, introspective ap-
proach to abstraction that tended to be biomorphic
rather than geometric in character, and that paral-
leled Abstract Expressionism in painting. Minor
White’s mystical landscapes realized with infrared
film and Aaron Siskind’s close-ups of graffiti and
peeling paint on walls, although different in char-
acter, can be seen as efforts to free photographicPHOTOGRAPHY AND PAINTING