Art Deco

Art Deco is a descriptive term for a style of decorative arts that spread widely in Europe and the United States between the World Wars, originating from French design culture and associated with the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925. Although the label itself only gained currency from the late 1960s, it is used retrospectively to describe work from roughly 1919–1939 that combined geometric elegance, bold design, and an ethos of distinction, elegance, and chic. In photography, Art Deco marks the adaptation of this stylized modernism to visual culture: a way of taming avant-garde experimentation for a bourgeois public and embedding the optimism and energy of the Roaring Twenties into images of everyday modern life.

Art Deco photographs are characterised by clean, streamlined shapes, stylised geometric forms, and a streamlined reinvention of classicism. Typical subjects include architecture, where photographers emphasise sleek lines and repeating patterns in iconic buildings; fashion and portraiture, where models may appear statuesque, posed against decorative settings to suggest glamour and poise; and still life or decorative applications, such as microphotographs repurposed as ornamental motifs. Studio practices might involve constructed geometric sets, dynamic viewpoints, and dramatic lighting, at times using a single intense light source to carve sharp shadows and graphic silhouettes.

There is no single Art Deco look and no foundational manifesto, which leaves its definition open and contested. It is often described as moderne but not fully modernist, a commercialised counterpart to the utopian ambitions of the avant-garde. Photographic Art Deco intersects with Pictorialism, Symbolism, and Modernism, as in work that evolves from Photo-Secessionist softness toward sharper geometric abstraction. It departs from the organic, curving forms of Art Nouveau in favour of symmetry and angularity, yet borrows elements from Cubism, Futurism, and non-Western historical motifs. By the mid-1930s, many of its visual strategies shade into the streamlined aesthetics of Streamline Moderne.