The Emancipation of Photography

From the early 1900s through to the 1960s, photographers moved away from traditional visual styles – culminating in an era that is now viewed as the bridge between pictorialism and contemporary photography. With the exhibition ‘Fotografien der Moderne’ – on view from 29 November 2023 to 25 February 2024 – Hanover’s Sprengel Museum presents excerpts from its in-house collection dedicated to this pivotal chapter in the medium’s history.

While fine-art photography from the 1960s onwards forms the primary focus of the museum’s holdings, the collection also includes numerous works from the first half of the twentieth century, which exemplify the core traits of modernism. In particular, they illustrate a new vision of photography that transcends its previous, mostly documentary purpose. The new movement revolutionised the medium, and paved the way for its inclusion in the world of fine art. You could say that photography (which was first patented in 1839) emancipated itself some 100 years after its invention – by no longer following the rules of painting, and claiming its unique possibilities as an artistic form of expression in its own right.

Just like the Sprengel Museum’s recent exhibitions, ‘What Modernism?’ and ‘Laboratory of Modernism’, the current presentation of around 180 works centres around the 1920s and 1930s. The featured photographers are: Walter Ballhause, Karl Blossfeldt, Paul Citroen, Hugo Erfurth, Alfred Ehrhardt, Gisèle Freund, Adolf Fuhrmann, Hein Gorny, Florence Henri, El Lissitzky, Lucia Moholy, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Alexander Rodtschenko, Jaroslav Rössler, Ernst Schwitters, Friedrich Seidenstücker, Michel Seuphor, Anton Stankowski, Anton Josef Trčka, Umbo, and Piet Zwart.