Photography's New Vision: Experiments in Seeing

Eugène Atget was the great chronicler of Paris at the turn of the century. His vast photographic archive captures a city on the precipice of modernization. Though his photographs of empty city streets were documentary in nature, the Surrealists admired their dreamlike quality and claimed Atget as one of their own despite his protestations. They believed any photograph could shed its original context and intent when viewed with a surrealist sensibility. Atget’s photograph of mannequins peering out of a shop window appealed to the movement by embodying the uncanny valley, where the human likeness of a nonhuman entity evokes both affinity and discomfort in viewers.

Eugène Atget
French, 1857–1927
Men’s Fashions, 1925, printed 1956
Gelatin silver print
Purchase, 74.163 C

A central figure among twentieth-century American photographers, Walker Evans created works in his early career that sample from the New Vision aesthetic, which he may have encountered while abroad in Paris in 1926. His photographs of New York City, made after he returned to the United States, feature dramatically angled or cropped scenes of architecture and city life. Evans made numerous photographic studies of the Brooklyn Bridge from both below and on the bridge, portraying it less as a recognizable landmark and more as a hulking expanse whose form fills each tight frame.

Walker Evans
American, 1903–1975
The Bridge, 1929
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Arnold H. Crane, 73.72 F

Florence Henri is well known for her manipulations of light and form that create complex, surrealist scenes. She used angled mirrors to frame, obscure, and replicate portions of scenes to dissolve a sense of perspective and space, as seen in this still life comprising mirrors, pears, and an image of the sea. After only one semester studying under László Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus in 1927, Henri shifted her focus from painting to photography and began using various experimental techniques such as photomontage, multiple exposures, photograms, and negative printing.

Florence Henri
American, born Switzerland, 1893–1982
Composition, 1932, printed 1974
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Dr. Joe B. Massey in honor of Maria L. Kelly, 2024.50

Aaron Siskind was recognized for the ways he rendered his surroundings into often stark shapes and forms, which reflected his fascination with contemporary trends in abstract art. He was an influential teacher at Chicago’s Institute of Design, which was founded by László Moholy-Nagy as the New Bauhaus. This image of a person flying or falling comes from a series Siskind made of the contorted bodies of divers plunging into Lake Michigan. He masterfully created its disorienting effect through tight focus on the floating figure without contextual elements.

Aaron Siskind
American, 1903–1991
Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation #37, 1953
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Adair and Joe B. Massey in honor of Gus Kayafas, 2000.234

Expanding on the New Vision precedent of disorienting aerial photography, Lucas Foglia photographs from a balcony at an acrophobia-inducing angle. The central figure floats in a pool far below within 160,000 square feet of plantings in an urban hotel complex. While emulating the spirit of an untamed rainforest canopy, this view is interrupted by the crowded five-lane street below and the swaths of glass-and-concrete architecture. Foglia’s Human Nature series explores humanity’s attempts to control and curtail nature while also seeking solace and wildness through it.

Lucas Foglia
American, born 1983
Esme Swimming, Parkroyal on Pickering, Singapore, 2014
Pigmented inkjet print
Gift of Irene Zhou, 2020.152

V. Elizabeth Turk is an Atlanta-based photographer whose work explores the connections between the human body and the natural world. To make this print, Turk used an analog process from the 1800s that involves coating a large sheet of paper with light-sensitive chemicals. She then arranged her model on top of the sheet and exposed it to light, creating a ghostly silhouette, before repeating the exposure with plants. The resulting photogram is a unique image in which botanical forms intersect with the body, alluding to bones, veins, and skin and suggesting a visceral bond between humans and the environment.

V. Elizabeth Turk
American, born 1945
Calaeno, 2018
Van Dyke print
Purchase with funds from Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection, 2019.182

Naima Green’s practice centers connection and collaboration to cast a tender lens on her own queer community of color. Her lyrical portraits take shape in intimate domestic spaces and airy outdoor environments that embody havens for the people in those spaces. Through double exposure and serial photographs, she provides what she calls “multiple entry points” into a moment in time, translating movements and emotions into a single image. She explains her interest in double exposure “as a means of capturing things that can’t be held in just one way . . . ,” allowing her to “play with loosening the narrative and letting go of some control.”

Naima Green
American, born 1990
It Lingers Sweet, 2022
Pigmented inkjet print
Purchase with funds from the LGBTQIA+ Photography Centennial Initiative, 2024.70