Political animals
Film and Photo exhibition in Stuttgart 1929 included the European version of modernism - 'New Vision'. First thread of this was constructivism - more political motivation eg Lissitzky in Russia.
Dada also grew out of this - used chemically constructed images amd photomontage and develpoed into surrealism - eg Man Ray Electricity (1931).
Third strand from Fifo was typological approach. eg Blossfeldt' s close upsp of plants.
Two projects dominated 1920s - Atget in Paris and Sander in Germany - Man in the Twentieth Century photographing rural folk outside Cologne.Becher's based there wrok on sander.
To teach and persuade
The term documentary was coined in 1920s, photographically best seen as the Roy Stryker attempt to document the US way of rural life by the Farm Security Administration. Most famous image of collection is Lange's Migrant Mother (1932).
Germans and Russians used photography for propaganda purposes, e.g. Hans Killian's work Facies Dolorosa which captures images of sick people.
The worker photographers
Movements such as Photo League in US and Mass-Observation in UK had touch of voyeurism, and rather class based, such as Spender in Bolton.
Finding a street vocabulary
The movement owed much to the advent of the Leica, and thus what may be termed the commercial documetary era, and to Paris in particular: kertez, Brassai amnd Cartier Bresson.
Others were Ehrenburg, taking down and outs in Paris, amd Bill Brandt in London, especially well known for nocturnal images.
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