New Vision
An interwar photographic movement that trains visual literacy for industrial modernity through radical viewpoints, sharp geometry, and experiments with light.
New Vision denotes an interwar photographic approach—often discussed under the German labels Neue Vision, Neues Sehen, and Neue Optik—that proposes the camera as a second eye and promotes a new visual language suited to modernity. Coined and theorized by László Moholy-Nagy in a Bauhaus context, it develops in the 1920s and 1930s across Europe, the United States, and other centers of photographic experimentation. It is often discussed under New Photography, a broad label for interwar photographic innovation, and the terms are sometimes used loosely, since New Vision’s rhetoric became a common shorthand for the era’s modernist photographic break. It positions itself against inherited conventions, especially pictorialist emulation of painting, and is frequently framed as a pedagogical project: training viewers in visual literacy for an industrial and technologically mediated world shaped by urbanism, mass communication, and the aftermath of World War I.
In practice, New Vision favors oblique compositions and reorients ordinary structures through high- and low-angle shots, extreme vantage points, abrupt cropping, and shortened perspective. Its images often translate horizontal order into dramatic diagonals, emphasizing geometry, spatial tension, and the perception of movement. Typical subjects include architecture, machinery, traffic, aerial views, and mass-produced commodities, as well as close-up studies of commonplace objects or plants that foreground underlying patterns and forms. Light is treated as a fundamental medium, sometimes with the photosensitive surface itself becoming central to production. Alongside camera-based work, New Vision embraces photograms and montage-based strategies, and may involve solarization, double exposure, and negative printing; it also incorporates scientific imagery such as X-rays or microphotography as part of photography’s expanded visual repertoire.
In relation to neighboring interwar approaches, New Vision is often contrasted with New Objectivity, which pursues rigorous technical clarity and an ideal of factual depiction, whereas New Vision stresses expressive experimentation and a more explicitly subjective reshaping of perception. It is also commonly linked to Constructivism and, at times, to Surrealism, especially in its use of fragmentation and visual shock, and with the Bauhaus aim of linking art, design, and utilitarian function.