The Art of Black and White Photography, 2nd Edition

11 Abstracts

Photography took the place of eighteenth and ninteenth century naturalistic painting. Starting with impressionism, painting went in its own direction and has increasingly liberated itself from a natural way of viewing the world. The exception was the realistic movement that emerged from naturalism. In painting, the realistic movement had the task not only to depict reality, but also to represent deeper traits of reality.

Photography had taken over the representation of nature, but photography also had to liberate itself from the restricted representation of reality. Thus, the movement to take photography out of the convention of realistic representation began at the turn of the century with the Russian photographer Aleksander Rodchenko ...