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Although a milestone in the history of Latin American photography, the work of Horacio Coppola is little known outside Argentina. His unorthodox angles and tilting frames, his attention to industrial and urban themes, and his experimentation with different lenses in the period between 1927 and 1931 were in absolute synchrony with the precepts of European New Vision and New Objectivity photography, and with American straight photography. That Coppola’s visual idiom was in tune with the latest photographic developments in interwar Europe is obvious. What remains unclear is how exactly he achieved that synchrony. Several scholars have wrestled with this question, which nevertheless remains elusive due to lack of evidence of direct contact with European photography prior to his studies at the Berlin Bauhaus in 1932 and his repeated attempts to downplay the influence contemporary photographers had on his work. The article provides a systematic study of Coppola’s aesthetic genealogy and his photographic borrowings through a critical examination of his early pictures and theoretical writings. It teases out possible direct and indirect channels of dialogue with the New Vision, New Objectivity, and straight photography in the second half of the 1920s, and probes the reasons behind Coppola’s reluctance to admit a connection with contemporary European photography in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article critically examines the landscape and cityscape photography of E. O. Hoppé. In Picturesque Great Britain(1926), Hoppé presented a vision of the nation refracted through the prism of an older Pictorialist aesthetic, whereas his later works, Romantic America (1927) and Deutsche Arbeit (1930), offered a more enthusiastic interpretation of the urban industrial world. Indeed, the latter volume is very much in the style of Die Neue Sachlichkeit. Hoppé’s photography is, therefore, characterised by a high level of visual mutability as he shifted styles to suit publication needs, and he appears a particularly adept commercial opportunist. Elsewhere, Hoppé’s work appeared simultaneously in contexts that rejected the technological utopianism of the New Objectivity and Amerikanismus. In Germany, American Zivilisation was often understood to be a threat to a more traditional Kultur, and Hoppé’s work was also published in contexts characterised by a reactionary modernism that aimed at a reconciliation of the old with the new. This article analyses the cultural, commercial and ideological forces that helped shape Hoppé’s work in Britain, Germany and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay argues that the photographic style known as Neue Sachlichkeit was in part a product of the educational ambitions of photographic archives in early twentieth-century Germany. While these archives first developed this approach to photography as a tool for visual investigation and analysis, Neue Sachlichkeit photography has since been separated from its pragmatic origins. The essay connects the dramatic close-ups and uncommon viewing angles found in these archives to Neue Sachlichkeit photography, thus contributing to recent reconsiderations of the boundaries between photographic document and artistic style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines ways in which the question of image profusion occupied photography circles in interwar Germany, analysing in particular decisions to reject, glorify, or tame photography's evident abundance. While art photography around 1900 sought to legitimate its standing through rarity, during the late 1920s the New Objectivity and New Vision movements instead trumpeted quantity as the basis of their aesthetic claims. Their success quickly prompted a wave of criticism summed up by the term 'photo-inflation': a deregulated 'wastefulness' in imagery that threatened in the longer run man's very critical and perceptual faculties. In the wake of this articulation of threat, work in series became one possible way to domesticate image profusion, to accept its inevitability while giving it a framework. Pushing further, the creation of archives, especially in collective undertakings, seemed to regulate the problem. Defended first by the left as a means to overcome capitalist structures of competition, this discourse of collective effort was soon co-opted by the National Socialists. In the process, a rhetoric of common effort became reconciled with an emphasis on elites and hierarchical formations - for example, in juried competitions or expert advice columns - in which 'great photographers' were made into 'guides' for the limitless mass of amateurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Umbo, one of the most stylistically influential photographers in Europe during the 1920s, followed a singular path that went beyond New Objectivity and Constructivism. In his photography he merged the stylistic elements of the 'New Vision' with the expressive aesthetic of Johannes Itten, his teacher at the Weimar Bauhaus. Unlike Albert Renger-Patzsch and László Moholy-Nagy, Umbo adhered to a romantic, poetic understanding of art. He took from Itten the idea that artistic perception of the world exists not in seeing alone but in three 'movements': seeing, feeling and recognising. Umbo therefore acknowledged in his work above all emotional need, a subject banned by 'New Photography' on the grounds of inconsistency with scientific accuracy and objectivity. In contrast to much 'New Vision' photography, optical means of expression do not become independent in Umbo's images, but serve in the formation of ideas, feelings or daydreams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]