On Abstract Photography

Since the late 1800s, photographers grappled with many of the themes, tremendous social and technological changes that engaged visual artists, musicians, writers generally as Western civilization transitioned from a primarily agrarian society to a highly industrial, urban and global one. The classical styles in painting, music, literature that had been dominant for centuries was buckling under the weight and speed of change.  Certainly one of the greatest shifts was the desire and challenge of expressing the internal emotional and psychological landscapes the new field of psychology was bringing to light. 

The evolution of modernism in painting from impressionism toward abstraction, in retrospect seems inevitable. The rigidity of classical tenets, composition and subject-matter gave way to artists’ desire to free themselves in order to seek and explore new ways of seeing and expressing their experience of change. Photographers too followed the muse of modernism.

Photographers explored making camera-less images by exposing found objects and treated photosensitive paper to natural light; surreal close-up and long-distance images, in which the details of natural or architectural patterning become abstract compositional motifs.

To be continued

Other topic ideas
the Found Object

History of Street painting & graffiti as modern expressions of the collective unconscious; the Berlin Wall