and Ansel Adams. Using a classic view camera and
using natural light exclusively, they made 810-inch
negatives, stopping their lenses down very far to
achieve the greatest depth of field. Vivid detail was
achieved by contact printing on glossy papers.
Retouching or enlarging in any measure was consid-
ered taboo. This aesthetic extended to the exhibition
oftheirprintsaswell.Eschewingdecorativeframes,
they mounted their prints on simple white card stock
sparsely spaced on gallery walls. This became stan-
dard for the exhibition of photographs throughout
the twentieth century. Adams combined his convic-
tions about the straight approach with his passion
for the outdoors. After being made aware of photo-
graphy after visiting the 1915 Panama-Pacific Expo-
sition in San Francisco, Adams avidly hiked and
photographed the mountains and spaces of Califor-
nia and the West. Closely linked to the environmen-
tal organization the Sierra Club and its concerns, his
images of the Sierra Nevada range and of Yosemite
produced classic pictures of twentieth century photo-
graphy. His famous ‘‘Zone System,’’ a sophisticated
procedure he advocated for determining precise
lights and darks, might be seen as the technical
expression of the straight photographers’ heightened
concern for craft.
Straight photography appeared in Europe in a
variety of manifestations, and for many reasons. In
Germany, the ‘‘straight’’ approach was embodied in
theNeue Sachlichkeit(New Objectivity) movement,
also the name of a soberly realistic contemporary
painting style. In photographs of everyday things,
Albert Renger-Patzsch made important images in
the early and mid-1920s. The title of his well-
known book,The World is Beautiful(1928), signaled
his interest in the straightforward depiction of every-
day subjects. Similarly, Karl Blossfeldt’s detailed
close-ups of plant forms achieved a monumentality
of design. The Cologne-based professional portrai-
tist August Sander made countless images of diverse
sitters, emphasizing their ethnic, class, and social
identities in the first half of the twentieth century.
He imagined a vast catalogue of all different types of
sitters that was to be calledPeople of the Twentieth
Century. Face of Our Time(1929) was the first man-
ifestation of this project. The Nazis confiscated it for
its liberality, but later observers have been suspi-
cious of Sanders’s treatment of ‘‘types.’’
The Influence of Avant-Garde Art
Avant-garde artists became interested in the expres-
sive and design aspects of photography in the first
decades of the twentieth century. This, in turn, led
photographers to experiment freely with the med-
ium. There was renewed interested in camera-less
photographs, made by placing objects on photo-
graphic paper and exposing the arrangement to
light. Though they had been made long before—
even during the dawn of the medium itself—these
images were now of interest for their pictorial qua-
lities. Several artists discovered them at the same
time. The Dada artist Christian Schad made his
‘‘schadographs’’ beginning in 1919. Man Ray pro-
duced his proto-Surrealist ‘‘rayographs’’ in Paris, in- The Hungarian Constructivist La ́szlo ́ Mo-
holy-Nagy, inspired by Schad and with the assis-
tance of his photographer wife, Lucia, made his
own abstract ‘‘photograms.’’ Overall, photograms
have become a staple of photographic education.
Another new medium was photomontage, which
involved pasting objects on photographs or in cut-
ting and assembling photographs into one picture.
Again, this had its roots in earlier practices, such as
the combining of watercolor and photographs in the
Victorian period and in the combination printing of
figures such as Oscar Gustav Rejlander and Henry
Peach Robinson. The most important montagists
hailed from Germany. Hannah Ho ̈ch produced cul-
turally aware montages made from ephemera—
newspaper, advertising, and vernacular photogra-
phy. Raoul Haussmann, like Ho ̈ch, was associated
with Dadaism, and also made jarring photomon-
tages. This hybrid medium was also of great interest
to the Surrealists, who admired the weird juxtaposi-
tions in those made by Max Ernst and others. They
also utilized new treatments of photography, includ-
ing solarization, multiple printing, and bas-relief
(paraglyphe), a technique used by Raoul Ubac
which produced a three-dimensional effect. Man
Ray’s Surrealist photos often made strange transfor-
mations of the female body.
Constructivists like Moholy-Nagy and El Lis-
sitzky were less interested in the preposterous
meanings than in combining images in the interest
of new spatial and light effects. The most prolific of
all was the Soviet Alexander Rodchenko, who pro-
duced myriad prints, posters, books and other pro-
jects. Their daring designs made the Stalin regime
keep careful watch. German-born John Heartfield
(born Hertzfeld) used photomontage in biting poli-
tical satires. Wittily combining photographs of
politicians with bizarre elements in absurd situa-
tions, and given lacerating titles, Heartfield’s anti-
fascist imagery appeared in illustrated workers’
magazines (such as theArbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung)
between 1929 and 1938 in Berlin and Prague.
The Bauhaus, a progressive German arts-and-
crafts school was the first in which photography
was taught as an integral part of a comprehensive
HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: TWENTIETH-CENTURY DEVELOPMENTS