Modernism

The definitions of modernism are:

1. Modern character or quality of thought, expression, or technique
2. A style or movement in the arts that aims to break with classical and traditional forms
3. A movement towards modifying traditional beliefs in accordance with modern ideas, esp. in the Roman Catholic Church in the late 19th and early 20th centuries

Modernism is the name for a wide range of movements. These movements include Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, Serialism, and Surrealism. Most of which appeared shortly before or after the First World War. It affected all the arts, in various fielfs such as poets, painters, composers, writers, architects, choreographers, directors and film-makers. Modernism has philosophical antecedents that can be traced to the eighteenth-century. It is rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.

Modernism is the works of artists who rebelled against nineteenth-century academic and historicist traditions, believing that earlier aesthetic conventions were becoming outdated. Modernist movements, such as Cubism in the arts, Atonality in music, and Symbolism in poetry, directly and indirectly explored the new economic, social, and political aspects of an emerging fully industrialized world.

In relation to photography its invenstion was part of the process of modernization of the means of production that took place during the Industrial Revolution. In the 19th century, more and more goods once made by hand, including images, became machine made. Photography is a modern form of image making, contributing to the development of modernism, for example in painting, by taking on its representational tasks.

By the beginning of the 20th century, with the diffusion of illustrated magazines and newspapers, photography was a mass- communication medium. Photojournalism acquired authority and glamour, and document-like photographs were used in advertising as symbols of modernity. Artists and photographers began looking at the photographs used in mass culture, to develop an aesthetic true to the intrinsic qualities of photographic materials: the accurate rendition of visible reality; framing that crops into a larger spatial and temporal context; viewpoints and perspectives generated by modern lenses and typically modern spatial organizations (for example, tall buildings); and sharp, black-and-white images. This objective, mechanized vision became art by foregrounding not its subject matter, but its formal structure as an image.

Bibliography:

https://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&q=modernism&tbs=dfn:1&tbo=u&sa=X&ei=KSZqT-uoC6GP0AXz2v3rCA&ved=0CCwQkQ4&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=4e222131bbc5c2ac&biw=1220&bih=933

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/modernism

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/modernism

http://www.answers.com/topic/modernism-and-photography