The exhilarating dawn of abstract photography

By Arthur House

Photography’s uncanny ability to represent the world had such a profound impact on society in the early 20th century that its role in non-representative art has been overlooked. “Shape of Light”, Tate Modern’s new exhibition, demonstrates photography’s contribution to abstraction and its close relationship with painting, often considered to have developed on a separate course.

In the 1910s photography was still young and advancing rapidly with technology. Photographs were becoming relatively easy and cheap to reproduce, giving them many commercial and scientific uses that other art forms lacked. Painting, on the other hand, was older than civilisation itself and required reimagining completely in response to the new technological age. This great aesthetic upheaval was modernism, with its ground-breaking rejection of the representative and embrace of the abstract.