An exhibition of over a hundred works of photography spanning the past century, the High Museum of Art’s “Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing” showcases the wide variety and far-reaching impact of the New Vision movement, born in 1920s Europe from a generation of artists shedding tradition and searching for unconventional expression in the wake of the unprecedented violence of World War I.
The movement first stemmed from teachers at the German Bauhaus: a sprawling art school and forum for experimentation in Europe’s interwar years. There, it spread to pupils, receiving the name “Neues Sehen” from one of its pioneers: artist and Bauhaus teacher László Moholy-Nagy.
Though the style was originally bound to the Bauhaus strict principles of composition, it soon came to be defined by varied, unusual perspectives, stark contrasts in form and lighting and diverse subjects. Central to these unconventional approaches was experimentation with photographic techniques such as photomontages and photograms that, while not new innovations, the movement brought into vogue.
Signs throughout the High’s exhibition explain five main pillars of New Vision photography — light experimentation, radical viewpoints, close-ups, surreality and manipulations — which are then highlighted in sections of works exemplifying each tenet.
The light experimentation portion clarifies the role of creative innovation in existing photographical methods throughout New Vision photography. Photograms, for example, had existed since the mid-1800s, but the process of making a photographic image without a camera by placing objects on photosensitive material and then exposing them to light became favored by many New Vision-influenced photographers, such as György Kepes, Alexander Rodchenko, Arthur Siegel and Atlanta-based photographer V. Elizabeth Turk, all of whose works are among those displayed.
Another widely used technique in New Vision photography is the process of solarization, characterized by an image of reversed colors resulting from its negative’s exposure to light during development. It had been pioneered in the 1930s by Man Ray and Lee Miller, but it was subsequently embraced by many New Vision photographers, such as Ilse Bing, whose 1934 “Le Vieux Paris Solariseol” is among many works in the exhibit created using solarization.
Perhaps one of the technical developments most pivotal to New Vision photography was that of lightweight cameras in the 1920s. Beginning with the introduction of Leica’s 35 mm camera in 1924, the spread of more portable, maneuverable equipment enabled photographers to capture more fleeting subjects and employ unusual vantage points. The second section of the High’s exhibition showcases works revolving around 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 photography. However, it is of disputed creation: it could have been captured by either the New Vision founder Moholy-Nagy or Lucia Moholy, his wife and a photographer and editor under-recognized for her work during her life. Moholy’s legacy is the subject of a digital piece by artist Sonja Thomsen near the exhibition’s entrance, a well-placed reminder of the people history can overlook.
Fittingly, the exhibition also displays works centered on close-ups, an approach utilized in many New Vision works to cast new light upon subjects perhaps overlooked. A cactus, electrical switches, a wine glass: any number of objects were fair game for artists of this exhibit. Many works on display capture the technological innovation of the early 20th century, from “Distillation Apparatus,” a commission for a glassware company, to Ansel Adams’s “Pipes and Gauges, West Virginia.”
Later pieces explore the intersection of science and art in other ways, such as Sheila Pinkel’s otherworldly rendering of plants in “Untitled,” created in 1977 with xeroradiography — the technology used in mammograms. Another botanical subject is captured in Harry Callahan’s 1948 “Weed Against Sky, Detroit,” one of many close-ups in the exhibition isolating the subject beyond recognition.
On the other hand, some works throughout the exhibition acutely evoke moments of the 20th century that are quite familiar. In two pieces displayed together, Soviet-era photojournalists Yakov Khalip and Georgi Zelma starkly document preparations for the oncoming war in the 1930s USSR. In her 1940 “Protest,” artist Barbara Morgan alludes to Nazism through the imposition of a nude goose-stepper above a mass gathering.
The exhibition also displays politically imbued works by famed sculptor, photographer and graphic designer Alexander Rodchenko. One of them, the 1924 “Mena Vsekh (‘Change All’),” utilizes photomontage to evoke propaganda images similar to those throughout the USSR at the time, reflecting his constructivist beliefs that art be “socially useful.” The distortion and abstraction of otherwise recognizable images present in the work further reflect the fourth pillar of New Vision highlighted in the exhibition: surrealism.
Surrealism, which emerged in the 1920s after the Great War, rejected conventional worldviews and embraced the free rein of the unconscious mind. Works in the surrealism section of “Photography’s New Visions” express the subconscious, the uncanny and the imagination in mind-bending and sometimes disturbing ways, a far cry from the faithful depiction of reality often associated with photography. A quote from Susan Sontag heads the section: “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 pieces in the surrealist section 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,” yet not all pieces are so overtly terrifying. Florence Henri’s 1932 “Composition” is serene by contrast, and Brassaï’s “Bal Musette” is a thoughtful window into illusions underlying a society night.
Surrealist influence overlaps in some pieces of the final tenet of the exhibition: manipulations. While many pieces in this last section are more recent, techniques such as double exposure, surface alteration, photomontage and multilayering have been employed since the early days of New Vision to disrupt and expand the visual experience. One such work, “Untitled, 77fb-22ne” by Ray Metzker, manipulates the subjects to make an image of a woman appear to be a mirage on a rough city sidewalk as part of Metzker’s “Pictus Interruptus” series interrupting landscapes with impositions of random objects.
In an age where photographic tools once unimaginable a century ago now fit inside the nearest smartphone, the experimentation of New Vision photography may seem obsolete by contrast. Yet New Vision photography, along with the broader Photo-Secession movement, went hand-in-hand with technological innovation to elevate photography from conventional portraiture and documentation to an art form in its own right nurtured by creative vision behind the lens. The High’s exhibition offers a look into the efforts of artists from across the world and across the past century who contributed to that evolution in their own individual ways.
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 visitors at the High Museum of Art through Jan. 4, 2026.