Abstract Elements

Abstract elements in photography are passages of shape, line, tone, texture, and color that an image presents as visual structure in their own right, loosening the link between the picture and the identifiable thing in front of the lens. Since a camera records an actual subject, photographic abstraction usually comes from isolating, reframing, or distorting it rather than from inventing forms. Photographers began working this way in the 1910s, in dialogue with Cubism and Vorticism. In 1916 at Twin Lakes, Connecticut, Paul Strand applied Cubist fragmentation and geometric reduction to porches, bowls, and shadows, and Abstraction, Porch Shadows appeared in the final issue of Camera Work in 1917. That same year Alvin Langdon Coburn showed his Vortographs in London, images made through a triangle of mirrors and presented as the first abstract photographs.

In practice, abstract elements depend mainly on framing and viewpoint. Close-up and detail views strip away context, so that a vegetable, a wall, or sand reads as a field of curves and marks. Edward Weston described his close-up Pepper studies of 1930 as abstract because they stood outside their subject matter. Aaron Siskind photographed peeling paint, rocks, and seaweed so that they lie flat against the picture plane, which his 1950 "Credo" named as his primary frame of reference. Other devices include the fragmentary close-ups and unexpected vantage points of the New Vision, aerial views that turn eroded land into pattern, deliberate camera movement, distorting lenses and mirrors, and darkroom methods such as solarization and multiple printing. Alfred Stieglitz's cloud Equivalents, begun in 1922, show how a familiar subject becomes disorienting and nearly abstract once its usual cues are withheld.

The Museum of Modern Art's 1960 exhibition The Sense of Abstraction sorted such work into dedicated experimental practice, occasional abstractions made as exercises, and "accidental" abstraction in which reportage turns into strong design, showing that abstract elements also surface in documentary pictures. Unlike the Photogram and other cameraless processes, which can yield wholly nonrepresentational images, abstract elements usually keep a residual trace of a recognizable subject. Siskind's walls are often read alongside Abstract Expressionism, since he worked in close dialogue with its New York painters.