Technology can quickly upend how we receive and share information. In the 1920s and ’30s, artists helped to shape a media landscape in which the ways images circulated were radically changing. Advances in print technology made it possible to distribute photographs in dynamic combinations in art publications, popular magazines, and political journals. Photobooks boomed as an expressive platform where artists could control the selection and sequence of their images. Photographs infiltrated everyday life, complemented by the accelerated transmission of information by radio, telephone, and film.
International exhibitions celebrated lens-based mediums as quintessentially modern art forms, and photographic imagery moved fluidly between print and gallery walls, recontextualized with different purposes for different audiences. Was mass communication liberating or alienating? The artist László Moholy-Nagy saw the potential for both: “Tomorrow we shall be able to look into the heart of our fellow-man, be everywhere and yet be alone.”