Photography Movements
写真運動
Dictionary entry
- 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.
- New Topographics 1975– / Style
Records, coolly, the landscapes humans have altered — suburbs, tract sites, industrial parks — instead of grand nature.
- Provoke 1968–1970 / Style
The manifesto of the magazine Provoke: provocative materials for thought. Are-bure-boke — grain, blur and out-of-focus as method — stripped photography of tidy meaning to recover the rawness of seeing.
- Typology Photography 1959– / Style
The Bechers' method: identical structures shot under identical conditions and hung in grids. Overcast light, strict frontality and unpeopled repetition turn individuals into types — the grammar of contemporary photography via Düsseldorf.
- 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.
- The Decisive Moment 1932– / Style
Cartier-Bresson's formula: the instant when form and event coincide, caught as geometry. The Leica's mobility and the no-cropping ethic built the century's ideal of reportage.
- Group f/64 1932–1935 / Style
The straight-photography manifesto of Weston, Adams and their circle, flying the flag of edge-to-edge sharpness at f/64 — rejecting Pictorialist haze for large-format precision and tonal wealth as beauty itself.
- 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.