Photography Movements
A history of arguments about what a photograph should be, waged by groups and magazines, alternating between pulling the medium toward painting and trusting the machine's eye.
Dictionary entry
- New Vision Photography 1920s–1930s / Style
Looks for perception only a camera can produce, using views from far above and far below, extreme close-ups and experiments with light.
- Pictorialism late-1800s–c.1914 / Style
Presented photography as art equal to painting, through soft focus, staged scenes and handworked prints.
- New Objectivity Photography 1920s–1930s / Style
Steps back from sentiment and records the structure of people and things coolly: sharp focus, frontality, typology.
- Tableau Photography 1970s / Style
Assembles the scene before the shutter and holds it in a single print made to hang like a painting, its figures acting as if no viewer were there.
- New Topographics 1975– / Style
Turns from grand natural scenery to the landscapes people have altered, recording suburbs, graded building sites and industrial zones without heat.
- Provoke 1968–1970 / Style
The magazine Provoke called itself provocative materials for thought. Working through are-bure-boke, coarse grain and blur and lost focus, it stripped photography of tidy meaning and gave seeing back its rawness.
- Typology Photography 1959– / Style
The Bechers' method of shooting one kind of structure under identical conditions and hanging the results in a grid. Repetition under overcast light, dead-on and without people, turns individuals into types, and by way of the Düsseldorf school it became a grammar of contemporary photography.
- New Color Photography 1976– / Style
The art photography of the everyday in color, legitimized by Eggleston's MoMA show. Dye-transfer density gave banal scenes gravity and overturned the rule that color was vulgar.
- Group f/64 1932–1935 / Style
A manifesto for straight photography from Weston, Adams and their circle, who took as their banner the edge-to-edge sharpness of an aperture stopped to f/64. Rejecting the haze of Pictorialism, they held that large-format precision and full tonal range were themselves the beauty of a photograph.
- FSA Documentary 1935–1944 / Style
The documentary program of Depression-era America's Farm Security Administration. Lange's Migrant Mother and 270,000 archived negatives defined the public role of documentary.
- Japanese Realism Photography 1950–1958 / Style
The postwar Japanese movement Domon Ken led under 'absolutely unstaged, absolute snapshots.' Hiroshima and Children of Chikuho faced society directly, drawing amateur monthly contests into the reconnection of photography and life.