Cvetka Požar / New Objectivity In Slovene Photography

New Objectivity marks an important period in European art of the twenties. It stems from the innovative ideas of the avant-garde from the beginning of this century and its modernist approaches which were then also introduced into the photographic medium. Slovene photography, on the edges of the great European cultures, entered the arena with a certain delay and modified New Objectivity into a much less radical movement. It would be justified to define it in terms of momentary withdrawal from accepted pictorial traditions by the rare well-informed photographers and not as a movement with a solid theoretical base. This very individual, unconnected and sporadic springing up of New Objectivity photography is therefore probably one of the reasons why the exhibition New Objectivity in Slovene Photography and its catalogue represent the first, rather late, synthetic presentation of this stylistic deviation in this country. The first essay in the catalogue - European avant-garde ideas in the twenties and New Objectivity in Slovene photography - hopes to elucidate the relationship between Slovene photography and European avant-garde ideas or the modernist realizations in the medium. This takes into account some key notions practised by two of the core representatives of European modernism in photography, Alexander Rodchenko and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who from a historical perspective seem important for a more complete understanding of external forces that generated the New Objectivity movement in Slovenia.

Texts: Cvetka Požar, Lara Štrumej
Language: Slovenian, English
Size: 29,5 x 24 cm, 60 pages
Binding: Softback
Publisher: Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana, 1998