Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Photography And Modernisms, Ellen Handy

Open Educational Resources

Today we live in a post-modern era, but for most of the 20th century, modernism was the dominant perspective in the arts and culture at large. And photography was the perfect modern medium. It literally provided artists and audiences with a new vision, using the technology of the camera to frame modern experience. As a recently invented medium with ties to mass media, photography departed from many fine art traditions. The drastic multiplicity of avant garde movements within which photography operated produced a constellation of loosely linked modernisms, rather than single avant garde program.

Almost all of the many avant …