What is New Objectivity?

Originally called Neue Sachlichkeit, the New Objectivity was an artistic movement that arose in Germany during the Weimar Republic (1918-1934) which characterized German painting and architecture as well as producing exciting and innovative results in photography.

Although principally describing a tendency in German painting, the term took a life of its own and came to characterize the attitude of public life in Weimar Germany as well as the art, literature, music, and architecture created to adapt to it. Rather than some goal of philosophical objectivity, it was meant to imply a turn towards practical engagement with the world—an all-business attitude, understood by Germans as intrinsically American.

Albert Renger-Patzsch

Albert Renger-Patzsch was a German photographer whose cool, detached images formed the photographic component of the Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”) movement. He was born on June 22, 1897, Würzburg, Germany and died on September 27, 1966, Soest, Germany. Renger-Patzsch experimented with photography as a teenager. After serving in World War I, he studied chemistry at Dresden Technical College. In 1920 he became director of the picture archive at the Folkwang publishing house in Hagen.

In 1925 Renger-Patzsch began to pursue photography as a full-time career as a freelance documentary and press photographer. He rejected both Pictorialism, which was in imitation of painting, and the experimentation of photographers who relied on startling techniques. In his photographs, he recorded the exact, detailed appearance of objects, reflecting his early pursuit of science. He felt that the underlying structure of his subjects did not require any enhancement by the photographer.

Karl Blossfeldt

Karl Blossfeldt was a German photographer and sculptor. He is best known for his close-up photographs of plants and living things, published in 1929 as Urformen der Kunst. He was inspired, as was his father, by nature and the ways in which plants grow, which lead him to participate in the ‘New Objectivity’ movement. He was born on June 13, 1865, Schielo, Germany and died on December 9, 1932, Berlin, Germany.

In Berlin from the late nineteenth century until his death, Blossfeldt’s works were primarily used as teaching tools and were brought to public attention in 1929 by his first publication Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature). Published in 1929 when Blossfeldt was 63 and a professor of applied art at the Vereinigte Staatsschulen für freie und angewandte Kunst, Urformen der Kunst quickly became an international bestseller and in turn, made Blossfeldt famous almost overnight. The abstract shapes and structures in nature that he revealed impressed his contemporaries. 

The New Objectivity was a movement in German art that arose during the 1920s as a reaction against expressionism. The New Objectivity was trying to challenge a return to unsentimental reality and a focus on the objective world, as opposed to the more abstract, romantic, or idealistic tendencies of Expressionism.

My Photos

These photos i tool at home and in the photo studio i have edited the photo of the fire place to make it more eye catching and appealing to the audience, the photo of the jewellery box and jewellery i took in the studio using flash lighting.

These are some of the photos i have edited in light room classic and photoshop. The ones with vibrant colours where edited in Lightroom and the ones with darker colours where edited in in photoshop. With the photoshop i cut one photo in half over another creating a weird effect but look nice. with the vibrant coloured photos me and my friend put coloured sheets over the lights to create different photos with the same set up.

Mary Ellen Bartley is an American photographer who is best know for her photography in books. During lockdown Mary Ellen Bartley did a shoot called ‘7 Things Again and Again’ this shoot involved taking a series of images of the same objects arranged differently each day. She displays the objects in a simple way however it is unique and effective.

Examples from her ‘7 Things Again and Again’ photoshoot:

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My response to Bartley’s work:

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Walker Evans

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Walker Evans is one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. His elegant, crystal-clear photographs and articulate publications have inspired several generations of artists. He took up the camera and gradually redirected his aesthetic impulses to bring the strategies of literature—lyricism, irony, incisive description, and narrative structure into the medium of photography.

Most of Evans’ early photographs reveal the influence of European modernism, specifically its formalism and emphasis on dynamic graphic structures.

Darren Harvey

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The Ravestijn Gallery presents the works of Darren Harvey-Regan, a photographer interested in the concept that photographs do not exist just to show things, but are physical things that become objects themselves.

Darren Harvey- Reagan and Walker Evans

In 1955, Fortune magazine published, ‘Beauties of the Common Tool’, a portfolio by Walker Evans featuring pictures of ordinary hand-made tools, such as a ratchet wrench and a pair of scissors.

Harvey-Regan was inspired by Evan’s work and first constructed a montage of Evans’s images to make new forms. He then sourced matching tools, cut them in half and re-joined various halves together, with the resulting physical objects being photographed to create his final work. The montaged tools become both beautiful and bizarre objects, in which a ratchet wrench is combined with a pair of pliers and a Mason’s trowel joined with a pair of scissors.

Object Studio Best Edits

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What is new objectivity?

The New Objectivity emerged as a style in Germany in the 1920s as a challenge to Expressionism. This refers to art in which the image of reality is distorted in order to make it expressive of the artist’s inner feelings or ideas.

As its name suggests, it offered a return to unsentimental reality and a focus on the objective world, as opposed to the more abstract, romantic, or idealistic tendencies of expressionism.

Albert Renger-Patzsch

Renger-Patzsch was born in Würzburg, Germany, and began making photographs by age twelve. In the early 1920s he worked as a press photographer for the Chicago Tribune before becoming a freelancer and, in 1925, publishing a book called Das Chorgestühl von Kappenberg (The Choir Stalls of Cappenberg). He had his first museum exhibition in Lübeck in 1927.

A second book followed in 1928 called Die Welt ist schön (The World is Beautiful). This was his best-known book, and is made up of a collection of one hundred of his photographs.

In its sharply focused and matter-of-fact style, his work exemplifies the aesthetic of the New Objectivity. Renger-Patzsch believed that the value of photography was in its ability to reproduce the texture of reality, and to represent the essence of an object.

Some examples of his work

Karl Blossfeldt

Karl Blossfeldt was a German photographer and sculptor. He is best known for his close-up photographs of plants and living things. He was inspired, by nature and the ways in which plants grow. He believed that “the plant must be valued as a totally artistic and architectural structure.”

Among his contacts at the Berlin Arts and Crafts School was Heinz Warneke. From 1923, he was professor at the Vereinigte Staatsschulen für Freie und Angewandte Kunst (United State Schools for Fine and Applied Art) in Berlin, Germany. He died aged 67.

Some examples of his work

Single object photoshoot

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