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What is modern photography?
Modern photography, also known as modernist photography, refers to the trends of photography that started in the first half of twentieth century in which photographers use camera as a tool to focus on an object or objects and emphasize on formal qualities. They try to be more abstract or unusual and not narrative. Modernism features development of modern industrial societies. In modern photography, artists moved away from simulating other forms of art such as painting and drawing. Many photographers have given many innovations to this art to establish it as an independent art form. They selected more urban subjects and new points of view.
Miyako Ishiuchi is one of the popular Japanese photographers. She has developed many pieces of photography since the late 1970s. She has worked on different themes ranging from modern art to postmodern art photography. However, Miyako Ishiuchi’s photography Untitled, from "Apartment", 1978, can be considered as the form of modern art photography or contemporary photography. This photograph is unpopulated just like most of the pictures of Ishiuchi. She shows the lacking of humanity and the fleeting moments. Ishiuchi also dealt with post – war Japan and the beginning of a new era. This interesting sense of touch to the past and present gives a surprising tenderness and compassion to the pictures of Ishiuchi in modern way.
Ishiuchi’s Untitled, from "Apartment", 1978, has many features that make it more like the modern form of art. These features may include simplicity, i.e. it lacks affectation or pretense, and the concept of formalism. It is reduced to a single place showing some form of authority by the photographer. This photograph is showing that the artist is visionary and liked to remain anonymous. It gives a sense of separation from high and popular art
Modernism challenges the conventional aesthetic assumptions. Modernist art keeps on breaking the stylistic and formal conventions. It has no place for allegory and being communicative. There is no need for representation and illusionism. It uses symbolic and formal elements to express its emotions. It likes experimentation and works on new ways of looking at things. Radicalism - political orientation to favor revolutionary change in government and society - and primitivism - belonging to an early stage of technical development with the features of simplicity - can easily be seen in modernism. If we look at the Miyako Ishiuchi’s photography Untitled, from "Apartment", 1978, we can find that many of these qualities are present in this form of art. Although this photograph has some features of postmodern style of art such as the presence of non-traditional materials and other mundane elements, and site-specificity but it is considered as modernist art due to the presence of rationality and non-technological progress as these are the characteristics which can only be found in modernist art.
This photograph can also have some features of high-modernism such as the presence of human progress and the change that can be brought about in the structure of society, but it lacks the more elite nature shown by the absence of intellectual materials and scientific innovations that is why we can consider it be a form of modernist art. Moreover, modernist art is retrospective in describing the future whereas high-modernity works on complete transformation of existing features, and that is why we can say that this art is featuring modernism.
