High Museum’s ‘Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing’ frames an artwork motion

An exhibition of over 100 works of images spanning the previous century, the High Museum of Art’s “Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing” showcases the wide range and far-reaching affect of the New Vision motion, born in Nineteen Twenties Europe from a era of artists shedding custom and trying to find unconventional expression within the wake of the unprecedented violence of World War I. 

The motion first stemmed from lecturers on the German Bauhaus: a sprawling artwork faculty and discussion board for experimentation in Europe’s interwar years. There, it unfold to pupils, receiving the identify “Neues Sehen” from certainly one of its pioneers: artist and Bauhaus trainer László Moholy-Nagy.

Though the type was initially sure to the Bauhaus strict ideas of composition, it quickly got here to be outlined by diverse, uncommon views, stark contrasts in type and lighting and various topics. Central to those unconventional approaches was experimentation with photographic strategies resembling photomontages and photograms that, whereas not new improvements, the motion introduced into vogue. 

Signs all through the High’s exhibition clarify 5 important pillars of New Vision images — mild experimentation, radical viewpoints, close-ups, surreality and manipulations — that are then highlighted in sections of works exemplifying every tenet. 

The mild experimentation portion clarifies the function of artistic innovation in current photographical strategies all through New Vision images. Photograms, for instance, had existed for the reason that mid-1800s, however the course of of constructing a photographic picture with out a digicam by inserting objects on photosensitive materials after which exposing them to mild turned favored by many New Vision-influenced photographers, resembling György Kepes, Alexander Rodchenko, Arthur Siegel and Atlanta-based photographer V. Elizabeth Turk, all of whose works are amongst these displayed.

Another broadly used method in New Vision images is the method of solarization, characterised by a picture of reversed colours ensuing from its adverse’s publicity to mild throughout growth. It had been pioneered within the Nineteen Thirties by Man Ray and Lee Miller, however it was subsequently embraced by many New Vision photographers, resembling Ilse Bing, whose 1934 “Le Vieux Paris Solariseol” is amongst many works within the exhibit created utilizing solarization.

Perhaps one of many technical developments most pivotal to New Vision images was that of light-weight cameras within the Nineteen Twenties. Beginning with the introduction of Leica’s 35 mm digicam in 1924, the unfold of extra moveable, maneuverable gear enabled photographers to seize extra fleeting topics and make use of uncommon vantage factors. The second part of the High’s exhibition showcases works revolving round such radical viewpoints, as “sharp diagonals, extreme vantage points and shortened perspectives opened novel pathways for perceiving otherwise commonplace environments.” 

“Stage Set for ‘Madame Butterfly’” dates to 1931 and exemplifies such traits of New Vision images. However, it’s of disputed creation: it may have been captured by both the New Vision founder Moholy-Nagy or Lucia Moholy, his spouse and a photographer and editor under-recognized for her work throughout her life. Moholy’s legacy is the topic of a digital piece by artist Sonja Thomsen close to the exhibition’s entrance, a well-placed reminder of the folks historical past can overlook. 

Fittingly, the exhibition additionally shows works centered on close-ups, an method utilized in lots of New Vision works to solid new mild upon topics maybe ignored. A cactus, electrical switches, a wine glass: any variety of objects had been honest recreation for artists of this exhibit. Many works on show seize the technological innovation of the early twentieth century, from “Distillation Apparatus,” a fee for a glassware firm, to Ansel Adams’s “Pipes and Gauges, West Virginia.” 

Later items discover the intersection of science and artwork in different methods, resembling Sheila Pinkel’s otherworldly rendering of crops in “Untitled,” created in 1977 with xeroradiography — the expertise utilized in mammograms. Another botanical topic is captured in Harry Callahan’s 1948 “Weed Against Sky, Detroit,” certainly one of many close-ups within the exhibition isolating the topic past recognition.

On the opposite hand, some works all through the exhibition acutely evoke moments of the twentieth century which might be fairly acquainted. In two items displayed collectively, Soviet-era photojournalists Yakov Khalip and Georgi Zelma starkly doc preparations for the oncoming struggle within the Nineteen Thirties USSR. In her 1940 “Protest,” artist Barbara Morgan alludes to Nazism via the imposition of a nude goose-stepper above a mass gathering. 

The exhibition additionally shows politically imbued works by famed sculptor, photographer and graphic designer Alexander Rodchenko. One of them, the 1924 “Mena Vsekh (‘Change All’),” makes use of photomontage to evoke propaganda pictures much like these all through the USSR on the time, reflecting his constructivist beliefs that artwork be “socially useful.” The distortion and abstraction of in any other case recognizable pictures current within the work additional mirror the fourth pillar of New Vision highlighted within the exhibition: surrealism.

Surrealism, which emerged within the Nineteen Twenties after the Great War, rejected typical worldviews and embraced the free rein of the unconscious thoughts. Works within the surrealism part of “Photography’s New Visions” categorical the unconscious, the uncanny and the creativeness in mind-bending and generally disturbing methods, a far cry from the trustworthy depiction of actuality typically related to images. A quote from Susan Sontag heads the part: “Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision.”

Some items within the surrealist part evoke nightmares, from the ghoulish mannequins of Eugène Atget’s “Men’s Fashions” to the marine terrors of Ralph Gibson’s rowboat in “Untitled” to Graciela Iturbide’s “Cementerio / Cemetery, Juchitán, Oaxaca” evoking “The Birds,” but not all items are so overtly terrifying. Florence Henri’s 1932 “Composition” is serene in contrast, and Brassaï’s “Bal Musette” is a considerate window into illusions underlying a society evening.

Surrealist affect overlaps in some items of the ultimate tenet of the exhibition: manipulations. While many items on this final part are newer, strategies resembling double publicity, floor alteration, photomontage and multilayering have been employed for the reason that early days of New Vision to disrupt and increase the visible expertise. One such work, “Untitled, 77fb-22ne” by Ray Metzker, manipulates the themes to make a picture of a lady seem like a mirage on a tough metropolis sidewalk as a part of Metzker’s “Pictus Interruptus” collection interrupting landscapes with impositions of random objects.

In an age the place photographic instruments as soon as unimaginable a century in the past now match inside the closest smartphone, the experimentation of New Vision images could appear out of date in contrast. Yet New Vision images, together with the broader Photo-Secession motion, went hand-in-hand with technological innovation to raise images from typical portraiture and documentation to an artwork type in its personal proper nurtured by artistic imaginative and prescient behind the lens. The High’s exhibition affords a glance into the efforts of artists from internationally and throughout the previous century who contributed to that evolution in their very own particular person methods. 

By the exhibition’s exit is a 1929 quote from artist Werner Graeff: “We hope that you are now convinced that you should treat with great suspicion, and refuse to accept, any kind of restriction on the way in which you take photographs.”

“Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing” is open to guests on the High Museum of Art via Jan. 4, 2026.