Futurism

Futurism is an artistic and social movement that promotes a new visual language for the industrial age, centered on speed, technology, and the energetic rhythms of modern life. Originating in Italy with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1909 manifesto, it sought to free culture from historical tradition and to replace stable, single-point perspective with a simultaneous vision in which several moments appear at once. The aim is to make viewers reconstruct time and movement from a single, static impression, translating an aesthetic of velocity into pictorial form.

In photography, Futurism appears in images that break up and prolong action through fragmentation, repetition, distortion, and controlled blur. Experiments such as Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s photodynamism used long exposures to record continuous trajectories, dissolving solid bodies into streaks and halos so that movement appears as an indivisible flow rather than a sequence of poses. Later writings promoted technical manipulation—multiple exposure and negative layering, photomontage and collage with text, and extreme viewpoints including aerial views and dramatic foreshortening—to intensify visual impact. Architecture, machines, and vehicles are favored subjects because they concentrate the mechanical energy and modernization that the movement glorifies.

Photography’s place within Futurism is contested. Many artists initially dismissed ordinary photographic practice as too static, and some painters argued that photodynamism risked turning creative invention into a merely mechanical procedure. The medium was often treated less as an autonomous art than as an expressive or political tool, before later manifestos reclaimed it while insisting on new, more aggressively constructed images. Futurist photography both builds on and sets itself apart from neighboring tendencies. It adopts Cubist fragmentation while stressing temporal rather than purely spatial simultaneity, rejects the analytical sequencing of chronophotography, and anticipates later avant-garde uses of montage, unconventional viewpoints, and light-trace techniques often associated with Bragaglia’s algebra of movement.