CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/30/2014

Object:Photo

In his Foreword to The Museum of Modern Art's monumental Object:Photo, presenting Modern photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection (1909-1949), MoMA Director Glenn D. Lowry writes, "This book showcases one of the most important acquisitions in the Museum's history, a collection of rare photographs made between the two world wars. The significance of the Walther collection lies not only in the exceptional quality of the photographs but also in their importance: these images lie at the foundation of today's photo-based world, a world of small-camera and journalistic omnipresence, dynamic and flexible graphics, and the dominance of photographic codes and representations of information. For the collection includes outstanding examples of European avant-garde photography of the 20s and 30s, work synonymous with artistic freedom—freedom from the conventions of painting and laborious stand-camera practice, freedom to flip, inert, and recombine images, freedom to concoct new processing and printing techniques and to photograph anything from any point of view. The resulting expansion of the expressive potential of photography was so vast that the aggregate of these explorations was termed the New Vision, and was paralleled by as great an expansion of the medium's reach: through illustrated magazines and newspapers, newsreels and cinema, and several pivotal books, these photographs became ubiquitous vehicles of culture, of information and entertainment, indeed of modernity itself. We today are the direct inheritors of that moment and accomplishment." Featured image, "Anna Oderfeld, Zakopane" (1911-12), is by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz.