Cubism

Cubism is an early twentieth-century art movement that rethinks how reality is represented by dismantling the single, fixed viewpoint that dominated Western art since the Renaissance. Emerging in Paris around 1907, particularly in the work of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, it analyzes subjects into geometric facets such as cubes, cones, and planes, then reassembles them on a flattened picture plane. Instead of suggesting continuous, illusionistic space, Cubism presents multiple viewpoints and moments at once, reflecting wider contemporary interests in non-Euclidean geometry, the fourth dimension, and the relativity of knowledge. Initially coined as an insult referring to "little cubes," the term soon came to designate a radical new approach to form and perception that became foundational for modern abstract art.

In photography, Cubism appears less as a fixed style and more as a set of working strategies derived from these ideas. Photographers adopt its principle of fragmentation by recording a subject from several angles or moments and combining these into a single, tightly constructed image. This can involve photomontage, multiple exposures, collage, or cut-and-assembled sequences of prints that present overlapping, shifting viewpoints. Other works use prisms, mirror devices, or digital tools to slice, rotate, and skew portions of an image into an angular grid. Across these approaches, emphasis falls on geometric structure, the disruption of classical perspective, and an awareness of the photograph as a flat surface. Subjects often include machinery, modern architecture, reflective interiors, faces, and still lifes, where edges, planes, and repetitions can be clearly articulated.

Within photographic discourse, Cubism is widely credited as a catalyst for modernist straight photography, encouraging sharp focus, simplified tonal structure, and geometric composition. Its influence is traced in the move from pictorialist atmosphere to a more abstract, formal language and in debates about pure photography as a medium with its own laws rather than an imitation of painting. At the same time, the term Cubism has often been used loosely, sometimes as shorthand for any nonacademic or fragmented imagery, and relatively few photographers identify themselves as Cubist in a strict sense. Its ideas instead diffuse into photomontage, Constructivism, and other experimental practices that treat the photograph as a constructed image rather than a transparent window onto the world.