1910–1920s: The Rise of Modernism

August Sander's vast portrait project People of the Twentieth Century grew in part from the prestige that physiognomy still held in early twentieth-century Germany.

Alvin Langdon Coburn first became known as a pictorialist through elevated city views and portraits of major cultural figures.

Charles Sheeler was an American artist who moved between photography and painting and helped shape the visual language of American modernism.

Fukuhara Shinzo was one of the central figures in the formation of modern photographic art in Japan.

Nojima Yasuzo was one of the most important Japanese photographers of the interwar period and a key figure in the move from pictorial softness toward a more rigorous modern photographic language.

For Emmanuel Radnitzky, later known as Man Ray, the decisive turn toward photography came after the 1913 Armory Show and his growing friendship with Marcel Duchamp.

Paul Strand's decisive break came in part from his first visit to Gallery 291 in 1907, where Lewis Hine introduced him to modern painting.

Alexander Rodchenko was one of the central figures of the Soviet avant-garde and one of the photographers who most radically redefined what the camera could do in modern visual culture.

André Kertész was a Hungarian-born photographer whose work helped define the lyric, modern possibilities of the medium between the wars.

Nakayama Iwata was a major figure in the development of modern photography in Japan, associated with commercial, portrait, and avant-garde-inflected practices in the interwar years.

Born in Hungary, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy served in World War I and began drawing on his own while still in the trenches.

Renger-Patzsch made the photographed object itself central, rejecting both pictorialist beautification and Bauhaus-style visual experiment in favor of precise structural description.

Germaine Krull was one of the most dynamic photographers of interwar modernism, working across portraiture, journalism, experimental views of machinery, and urban street life.

Yasui Nakaji is one of the central figures of modern Japanese photography.