Modern Objects

Huxley-Parlour are pleased to announce Modern Objects, an exhibition that explores the radical shifts in photography as Modernism dawned. Taking the genre of still life as its conceptual foundation, the exhibition examines image-making in the age of expanding mass-production, burgeoning consumerism, and reification of the object. The photographers in the exhibition each lent fresh perspectives to this rapidly modernising world.

Includes: Manual Alvarez Bravo, Margaret Bourke White, Imogen Cunningham, Jaromir Funke, Andre Kertesz, Francois Kollar, Dora Maar, Tina Modotti, Barbara Morgan, Paul Outerbridge, Jaroslav Rossler, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston

The tumultuous cultural and social shifts in the years after the First World War required an artistic means of breaking with dominant discourses and dismantling established traditions. It was in this fertile ground that photographers rejected the prevailing Pictorialism, and set forth an experimental new vision for the medium, influenced by significant cultural shifts and wider developments of Modernism. In his 1935 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ the theorist Walter Benjamin acknowledged a new artistic order, distinct from that which had come before. Central to Benjamin’s critique was the expansion of mass-production and the dawning of the age of consumerism and object fetishisation.