Expressionism

In the context of photography, Expressionism designates approaches that prioritize inner feelings and subjective experience over faithful representation of the external world. Emerging in dialogue with early twentieth-century German Expressionism, it adapts that movement’s drive to distort reality in order to make it expressive of emotional and psychological states. German expressionist photographers aimed to turn the camera into an instrument of inner vision, deliberately warping the image of reality so that portraits, figures, or city scenes became dramatic projections of anxiety, desire, or social unease. Later, abstract expressionist tendencies in photography placed even greater emphasis on non-figurative compositions of shapes and tones, treating the photograph as a field for emotional intensity rather than a record of recognizable subjects.

Aesthetically, expressionist photography often foregrounds tension, disorientation, and mood. Visual traits may include angled viewpoints, extreme close-ups, radical cropping, blur, grain, and movement, along with harsh or theatrical lighting that throws faces into deep shadow or bleaches them with glare. Shadows, silhouettes, and off-kilter compositions contribute to a sense of estrangement or psychological pressure. Subject matter ranges from distorted self-portraits and contorted bodies to everyday faces made emblematic and fraught, as well as images where line, texture, and color are manipulated to heighten mood rather than describe form. Technically, practitioners use intentional camera movement, multiple exposures, selective focus, macro work, and extensive darkroom or digital manipulation to "create, not replicate," favoring intuition, spontaneity, and calculated accident.

Debates around expressionism in photography frequently turn on its relation to neighboring terms. Labels such as expressionistic, personally expressive photography, Subjective Photography, photo-expressionism, macro expressionism, or "novel" expressionism signal overlapping but contested attempts to name subjective, emotionally charged image-making. Some critics have argued that certain strands drift into sterile formalism, while others see them as a counterweight to photography’s dominant realism.