New Objectivity

New Objectivity (German: Neue Sachlichkeit) refers to an aesthetic shift in German arts after World War I toward rigorous, unsentimental realism and detached description of material reality. The term, whose root sense is "matter-of-fact," was coined by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub for a 1925 exhibition of post-Expressionist painting and later applied to photography as the movement’s values spread across media. Emerging in the Weimar Republic, it developed amid postwar disillusionment and social upheaval, proposing rational observation as an antidote to Expressionism’s emotional subjectivity and to idealized, romantic representation.

In photography, New Objectivity favors clarity, precision, and maximum sharpness, presenting subjects with an impartial, unembellished look. Practitioners typically use straightforward "straight" methods—careful exposure, development, and printing—avoiding overt manipulation in order to support a claim of factual description. Compositions often isolate things for scrutiny through close-ups, macro views, and emphatic angles, while remaining formally ordered and legible. Subjects often range from industrial and urban environments to everyday objects and natural forms rendered with high descriptive detail, as well as portraits approached as systematic studies, often presented with a restrained, unsentimental tone.

In photographic discourse, New Objectivity is often discussed as a primary mode within the broader New Photography era, but contrasted with New Vision experimentation (photograms, distortion, and a more subjective embrace of oblique viewpoints). Its legacy persists in later German documentary and typological practices, including the systematic, conceptual work associated with Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher and the Düsseldorf School, and it overlaps in spirit with American straight photography’s commitment to unmanipulated clarity.