New Wave
New Wave describes various photographic movements adopting experimental aesthetics, drawing on cinema, music, and wider visual culture to challenge established visual conventions.
In photography, New Wave refers to a set of movements that borrow the term’s association with radical departures in cinema, music, and visual culture to signal a break from established styles. The label first emerges from French New Wave cinema, where directors asserted creative autonomy and rejected conventional narrative and visual language. It is later taken up in relation to post-punk music cultures, American cinema, and several national photographic scenes, where it often marks institutional resistance and the emergence of previously overlooked or marginalized voices. The term is flexible rather than strictly defined, and is frequently attached to distinct regional "New Waves," such as Slovak or Thai photography, to indicate a new direction in aesthetic priorities and artistic identity.
New Wave practice in photography often emphasizes a cinematographic, romantic, and sometimes dreamlike mood, with soft, floating tonalities and framing that can appear deliberately awkward or "incorrect." Some strands are documented through on-set or performance-based work; others adopt more constructed scenes, staging, or expressionist gestures. Technically, New Wave photographers may favor portable cameras and available light, but also experiment with hand-colored black-and-white prints, cross-processed slide film, electronic flash, and medium-format systems. In certain contexts, such as Latvian New Wave photography, these experiments are combined with a documentary approach and large thematic series that mute explicit social critique in favor of more open, associative readings.
Debates around New Wave photography often revolve around social responsibility and its relation to modernism and postmodernism. In the Slovak context, for example, New Wave photographers explicitly distance themselves from humanistic and socially engaged traditions that treated photography as a moral conscience, preferring emotional intensity, irony, eroticism, and subjective expression. Across different usages, the term frequently overlaps with postmodern tendencies, appropriating modern art forms such as Pop Art, photomontage, and comic-inspired graphics. As a result, New Wave functions less as a single coherent style and more as a recurring label for photographic practices that use experimental language to question inherited norms.