cisely, or a new culture that would take into account
the physicaltabula rasaof the war. The society that
emerged sealed the central presence of the machine
in modern life, and photography would become the
perfect instrument and expression of that mechan-
ical modernity. It fully entered the visual art scene
while expanding dramatically in the worlds of infor-
mation, industry, and commerce. All the future
developments and issues of photography date back
to those interwar years, which produced some of the
most interesting and complex works—a fact that
latter-day authors tend to neglect.
Photography was by then practised the world
over and by more and more segments of the popu-
lation—in South America, Australia, Asia, and
Africa—although much remains to be done to
document those local practices. For all intents and
purposes, however, the history of the medium was
still almost exclusively written in Europe, North
America, and Japan, if only because these were the
centers of industrial power. Issues were, however,
notably different in Europe and the United States,
and despite comparable forms, the photographic
expressions of the two continents diverged.
The first characteristic of interwar photography
was its cross-fertilization, with the powerful inter-
nationalization that took place after the Great War
and until the early 1930s with the rise of the Nazi
State in Germany and its subsequent expansion in
central Europe.
Circulation
The Europe of the aftermath of the war was one of
the circulation of artists—and photographers in par-
ticular—and of the establishment of a few art capi-
tals: Berlin, London, Paris, and Prague. In Paris, a
particularly interesting concentration of emigrant
photographers produced a rich creative ambiance,
although it never took the form of ‘‘schools,’’ either
formal or informal. The most active and influential
photographer was certainly Man Ray (1890–1976),
an American expatriate who came to Paris in 1921.
Later on arrived Andre ́ Kerte ́sz (1894–1985) and
Brassaı ̈(1899–1984) from Hungary, Florence Henri
(1893–1982), born in the United States, and Ilse Bing
(1899–1998) from Germany, as well as Lisette Model
(1906–1983) from Austria.
In Germany, the Bauhaus (1919–1933) encour-
aged the bridges between all forms of expression
and disseminated its theories in Europe through its
students. One of the most emblematic figures of these
(trans)continental migrations was La ́zslo ́ Moholy-
Nagy (1895–1946) who left Hungary for Austria,
before becoming one of the theoreticians of the Bau-
haus and reconstructing it in Chicago in 1937 as the
Institute of Design. His photographic and theoretical
work as well as his teaching condensed all the formal
and intellectual experiments of the period, compel-
ling him to explore and invent the language of the
future—with the camera—to paraphrase his often
quoted statement that the new illiteracy would be
visual (Painting, Photography, Film, 1925–1927).
But the most open center was Prague, which inher-
ited both the French influence and that of the Bau-
haus, as well as the American avant-garde. In Prague,
the camera really became the instrument of moder-
nity with Jaroslav Ro ̈ssler (1902–1990) and his
abstract compositions, Jaromir Funke (1896–1945)
with his surrealistic images and photographs of indus-
trial objects, Josef Sudek (1896–1976), who mixed
classicism and surrealistic innovation—not unlike
Euge`ne Atget and the early Walker Evans—and of
course Frantissek Drtikol (1883–1961) who experi-
mented in the 1920s and early 1930s with the nude,
mixing genres and forms in a most original way.
The influence of European photographic develop-
ments was also felt in Japan. TheFilm und Fotoexhibi-
tion (1929) in Stuttgart traveled to Tokyo and Osaka,
and Japanese photographers acclimated European and
especially German modernism, experimenting in fram-
ing and manipulation of the image, away from the more
traditional practices—portraiture, genre scenes, and Pic-
torialism—at a time when Japan was undergoing a
cultural revolution of unprecedented magnitude.
Photographers in the United States kept in close
touch with European developments, and participated
in considerable numbers inFilm und Foto.Some fig-
ures such as Berenice Abbott, who made Atget known
and was deeply influenced by the Bauhaus aesthetic,
spent significant time in Europe and was friendly with
many European artists. On the whole, however, the
United States developed a different course, because of
the divergent conceptions of the place of the artist in
society and perhaps more importantly of the very
nature of society and the place of the machine in it.The Cultural Revolution in Europe
Photography between the wars cannot be reduced
to avant-garde practices and to New Vision (Neue
Sehen) or New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit)—
two loose but powerful terms covering experimental
practices in Germany, France, Italy, and the Soviet
Union. More classical, post-Pictorialist, or simply
poetic and pastoral images were made, printed,
exhibited, and appreciated (see Kurt Hielscher’s
Deutschland, 1924), and stimulated a growing
body of serious amateurs. There was also a power-
ful continuation of portraiture, the best-knownHISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: INTERWAR YEARS