Modern Photography

About

Around 1900 many art photographers imitated painting, blurring and hand-working their prints. Modern photography turned the other way. Alfred Stieglitz, once a leading Pictorialist himself, published Paul Strand's blunt, close-cropped images in the last issues of his magazine Camera Work in 1916–17, and Strand's Wall Street (1915) reduced pedestrians to small shapes beneath massive shadows.

In California Edward Weston photographed peppers, shells and nudes with large-format sharpness, as in Pepper No. 30 (1930), and in 1932 he formed Group f/64 with Ansel Adams and others, named after a small lens aperture. In Europe László Moholy-Nagy and Alexander Rodchenko explored steep angles and photograms, and August Sander catalogued German society by profession and class. In the 1930s Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange photographed the Depression for the US government, Berenice Abbott recorded New York's changing buildings, and Henri Cartier-Bresson used a small Leica to catch fleeting moments in the street.