Photo

As photographers looked at the world with an artist's eye, photography became a new means to interpret reality.

The Dusseldorf School of the 1960s sought to preserve the memory of a disappearing world as the industrial landscape began to change.

A wind of madness swept over European photography in the 1920s. Verticals and horizontals were abandoned, as were the rules of perspective handed down since the Renaissance. The New Vision saw the diagonal as the axis of modernity.

The act of photographing one's private world affirmed the importance of a subjective point of view in images captured for the photographer's personal use. Taking the camera into places out of bounds to others made the rest of us voyeurs.

As photography escaped the rigidity of its rectangular format, magazines covered everything from the Dustbowl to New York nightlife to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

To tell a story better, photographs were scripted, executed, and then assembled by computer. Reality became a construction process in which all were free to follow their own imaginations.