Photography Art Movements

These are the important Photography art movements, styles, tendencies, groups, and schools that we currently cover. More are on the way!

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Photography: 23 of 87 Total Movements

The Barbizon School

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Started: 1830

Ended: 1870

Named after the village of Barbizon, France where the artists gathered, the group of outdoor, Naturalist painters included Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Theodore Rousseau, and Jean-Francois Millet.

Bauhaus

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Started: 1919

Ended: 1933

Bauhaus is a style and movement associated with the Bauhaus school, an extremely influential art and design school in Weimar Germany that emphasized the functionality and efficiency of design alongside its material properties. Prominent teachers include Josef Albers, Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Paul Klee.

Black Mountain College

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Started: 1933

Ended: 1957

Black Mountain College was an experimental school founded in the middle of the twentieth century on the principles of balancing academics, arts, and manual labor within a democratic, communal society and influnced many important artists.

Body Art

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Started: 1961

Ended: 1980

Many Performance artists used their bodies as the subjects, and the objects of their art and thereby expressed their distinctive views in the newly liberated social, political, and sexual climate of the 1960s. From different actions involving the body, to acts of physical endurance, tattoos, and even extreme forms of bodily mutilation are all included in the loose movement of Body art.

The CoBrA Group

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Started: 1948

Ended: 1951

CoBrA was an avant-garde art collective spanned the cities of Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam, focused on elements of spontaneity, experimentation, primitivism, and fantasy

Conceptual Art

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Started: Mid 1960s

The practice of Conceptual art became popular after the 1960s and presented people with an idea about art, which was more significant than the completion of a tangible and traditional work of 'art'. The aim was to create a concept that obliged people to consider the nature of art itself, and decide for themselves whether what was present was a work of art.

Dada

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Started: 1916

Ended: 1924

Dada emerged in the early twentieth century as a literary and artistic movement that celebrated random chance, readymade artworks, and outragous performances. Its practitioners, including Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, and Marcel Duchamp, scorned bourgeois conventions of high culture, especially the appreciation for artistic intention and skill.

Dada and Surrealist Photography

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Started: 1919

Ended: 1960s

This ground-breaking practice of photography was inspired by Dada's improvisational practices and the Surrealist's foray into the unconscious, dream, and fantasy realms. Many artists contributed various works that ultimately stretched the possibilities of the medium.

Earth Art

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Started: 1960s

Earth art, or Land art, a term coined by artist Robert Smithson, refers to artworks from the 1960s and '70s that employed land and other natural elements. It is typical of a time when artists rejected the traditional art object, expanded definitions of sculpture, and sought to move art outside the conventional art world structure of galleries and museums.

Feminist Art

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Started: 1960s

Feminist art emerged in the 1960s and '70s to explore questions of sex, power, the body, and the ways in which gender categories structure how we see and understand the world. Developing at the same time as many new media strategies, feminist art frequently involves text, installation, and performance elements.

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Fluxus

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Started: 1959

Ended: 1978

Fluxus was an international network of "intermedia" artists of the 1960s who worked in fields ranging from music to performance to the visual arts. Taking their name from the Latin "to flow," Fluxus artists adopted an often anarchic and satirical approach to conventional forms of art, and their ideas paved the way for Conceptual art.

Happenings

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Started: 1958

Ended: Early 1970s

The term "happening" was coined by artist Allan Kaprow in 1957 to decribe an art event, often staged or pre-scripted, that requires active participation from an audience to come to full fruition.

New Objectivity

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Started: 1919

Ended: 1933

New Objectivity, or Neue Sachlichkeit, was a style of German art that emerged in the 1920s in reaction to post World War I trauma and difficulties. Artists such as Otto Dix were savagely satirical and critical of society, while others evolved a cool and classical style that echoes other European art movements at this time.

Nouveau Réalisme

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Started: 1960

Ended: 1970

Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism) expanded the materials and ideas of art in a Europe that was recovering from horrible war and a new forms of cultural and commercial consumption.

Performance Art

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Started: Origins in 1910s, Movement in 1960s

Performance art is a modern form of art that emphasizes the experiential and the relationship between performer and audience. It developed in the 1960s with such artists as Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovic and Allan Kaprow. Not to be confused with the performing arts (dance, theater and music), Performance art is closely related to Conceptual art, in which any inherent meaning is in the eye of the beholder.

Photorealism

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Started: Early 1960s

Photorealism is a style of painting that was developed by such artists as Chuck Close, Audrey Flack and Richard Estes. Photorealists often utilize painting techniques to mimic the effects of photography and thus blur the line that have typically divided the two mediums.

The Pre-Raphaelites

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Started: 1848

Ended: 1890

The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of English painters whose goal was to reform art by rejecting the classical influences of Raphael, to return to a more mediaval approach to the arts. Romanticism was a great influence on this group and they were interested honest depictions of nature.

Social Realism

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Started: 1929

Ended: Late 1950s

Social Realism refers to a style of figurative art with social concerns - generally left-wing. Inspired in part by nineteenth-century Realism, it emerged in various forms in the twentieth century. Political radicalism prompted its emergence in 1930s America, while distaste for abstract art encouraged many in Europe to maintain the style into the 1950s.

Straight Photography

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Started: 1910

Straight Photography is a movement centered on depicting a scene in sharp focus and detail as a way to emphasize the photographic medium and distinguish it from painting. Straight Photographers manipulated darkroom techniques to enhance the photograph with higher contrast and rich tonality.

The Pictures Generation

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Started: 1974

Ended: 1984

The Pictures Generation was a loosely knit group of artists working in photography, and video who utilized appropriation and montage to reveal the constructed nature of images.

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Photography: 23 of 87 Total Movements

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