practitioner being August Sander (1876–1964), as
well as Hugo Erfurth (1874–1948) who made por-
traits of artists, politicians, and leaders of the time.
The movement was made possible by Dadaism and
Futurism—which had started the upsetting of tradi-
tional values in art during World War I—and would
in turn feed Surrealist image-making (Jacques-Andre ́
Boiffard, Hans Bellmer, Raoul Ubac, and Man Ray).
ButitistobeseeninthecontextofGermanexpression-
ism and Soviet Constructivism that gave it its real aim
and ideology. The issue was clearly to change how
people saw the world in order to prepare them for the
new and better times to come, and in some cases—in
the Soviet Union—to construct a modern industrial
society out of a rural one. As the photographic image
became omnipresent in the media, both in news and
advertising, it turned into an instrument of learning and
ultimately of active propaganda. Far from ‘‘pure art,’’
the European practice of the period was committed and
in some sense ‘‘total’’ as the 1928 title of an article by
Johannes Molzahn in Das Kunstblatt proclaimed:
‘‘Nicht mehr Lesen, Sehen’’ (Not mere reading, seeing!).
Formally, avant-garde practice of the time can be
characterized by the change—and often break up—
of point of view and the creation of a new experi-
ence of the commonplace and trivial: high- or low-
angle shots, extreme close ups, and fragmentation
of subjects often leading to total abstraction. This
‘‘vision’’ is intimately connected with industrial
objects including buildings.
The object triumphed in the 1920s as it occupied
all the aspects of daily life (Aleksandr Rodchenko,
Albert Renger-Patzsch, Moholy-Nagy, Germaine
Krull, Hans Finsler, Umbo). Renger-Patszsch’s pro-
grammatic book for the new vision,Die Welt ist
Scho ̈n,(The World is Beautiful)of1928wasinfact
supposed to be calledDie Dinge(Things). As for the
human figure, it did not quite escape the effects of
the mechanical eye in the distortions of Andre ́Ker-
te ́sz and Bill Brandt, and perhaps first and foremost
in the renewal of the nude, transformed by a Drtikol
and a Maurice Tabard, or Umbo’s mannequins and
Bellmer’s disarticulated and uncanny dolls.
The other direction was that of the photomontage,
multiple exposure, and the cameraless photography
with the photogram. Photograms—shadows of
objects on photographic paper—were extensions of
X-ray photography and could very well have been re-
invented in the twentieth century by Moholy-Nagy or
Man Ray, both beginning to practice the form in
- This double ‘‘origin’’ is significant of its expres-
sive as well as instrumental function. Passively objec-
tive traces of common objects, photograms construct
atthesametimeastrangeandmysteriousworldthat
begs interpretation or at least opens the image to wide
narrative associations. The superimposition and the
creative use of ‘‘mistakes,’’ particularly that of ama-
teur and vernacular practice, produced in the hands
of El Lissitsky, T. Lux Feininger, Herbert Bayer, Man
Ray, Rodchenko, Tabard, Moholy-Nagy, and others,
images which were either akin to automatic writing or
more inducive to meditation on a dream-like world,
made up of improbable meetings or conjunctions,
combining once again the reality of the objects and
their surreal connections. All these techniques aimed
at shifting the center of representation from simple
being-ness—that is, the weight of the presence of the
object itself—to one of association and structure pro-
ducing meaning.
Photomontage, an extension of collage practised
since the nineteenth century, took on a new vitality in
the 1920s, boosted by Dadaism, Cubism, and the
development of the poster, and more generally, graphic
design as it came to be used as a visual message. In that
respect, it can be seen as a manner of integration of the
image into language, constructing statements as a
mechanic constructs a machine. Mixed and hybrid in
essence, the photomontage became an activity in itself,
culminating with theFotomontageexhibition of 1931.
With authors such as Kurt Schwitters, Rodchenko,
Moholy-Nagy, and numerous lesser-known or anon-
ymous artists, it was one of the central practices of the
New Vision although now it tends to be seen as a
secondary practice. It formed the basis for the budding
art of graphic design, which bloomed in central Europe
and the Soviet Union. Poster design, political and
commercial advertising, and magazine layout provided
the best outlets for expressions of photomontage (Die
Neue Linie, Vu, Regard). More polemic forms, such as
John Heartfield’s, hinted at the political force of photo-
graphy, its power on ‘‘the masses’’ and thus its poten-
tial revolutionary nature. This direction, however, was
ambiguous and the power of the visual image made its
use by totalitarian states, notably the Soviet Union of
the mid-1920s, then Italy, and eventually Germany in
the early 1930s, particularly easy.USA: The Nature of Photography
American photographers had quite different con-
cerns. They kept in close touch with European devel-
opments—and sometimes emulated them, especially
the most obvious stylistic figures of Constructivism
(Abbott, Evans) or New Objectivity (Paul Strand,
Charles Sheeler, Margaret Bourke-White, Evans),
but their position and issues were different, especially
as regards the role of the photographer in society.
This would explain the development of the medium
in the United States in the post-World War II years,
and its relative supremacy.HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: INTERWAR YEARS