Abstract Expressionistic Photography

Face it. All the photographs in these galleries are in fact merely flat rectangles of light. What kind of photographs could you make if you took this flatness and rectangleness as your main starting point? The Abstract Expressionist movement in art, which started in New York in the late 1940s, is said to have been a reaction against the horrors of the Second World War. Seemingly apolitical, emotional, and even perhaps nihilist, Abstract Expressionism was a sharp break from the often explicitly political and realistic Photographic Modernism and Social Realism art movements of the 1930s. This largely non-figurative school of art took inspiration from the philosophy of Existentialism, and the process of making art was considered to be more important than the final object. Abstract Expressionist painters were inspired by photographers, while photographers in turn were inspired by the painters.