New Objectivity Photography vs Precisionism
新即物主義写真 / プレシジョニズム
New Objectivity Photography comes from Photography Movements and Precisionism from American Modern Art. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
New Objectivity Photography
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Steps back from sentiment and records the structure of people and things coolly: sharp focus, frontality, typology.
Precisionism
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Paints factories, silos, cities and machines reduced to clear contour, simple geometry and smooth planes.
| New Objectivity Photography | Precisionism | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1920s–1930s | 1910s–1940s |
| Family | Photography Movements | American Modern Art |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Sharp focus / Frontality / Repetition and types / Material detail | Sharp contours / Industrial landscapes / Geometric simplification / Smooth surfaces |
| Best used for | Photographing trades or buildings under one condition to make them comparable · Showing the detail of a product or a part precisely and without sentiment | Rendering factories and warehouses as ordered and quiet images · Showing industrial structure as form, with no people in the frame |
| Type | No headlines, only the subject name and conditions in one fixed format | Keep only the lettering already on the building and add none |
| Composition | Frontal, level, centered, with the same background every time | Build on horizontals and verticals, split planes with hard diagonal shadows |
| Material | Deep depth of field, even overcast light, fine grained printing | Smooth paint with no visible stroke, grey to white tones, hard light |
| Caution | One frame is no typology, and without matched conditions it ends as a pile of expressionless pictures. Do not trust the pose of objectivity, and read the bias that classification and viewpoint produce. | Cleaning up contours without deciding where the light comes from leaves the planes unexplained, and the picture flattens into a technical drawing. |