9.1: What is Modernity?

Modernity is one of those terms that seems straightforward until you actually try to define it. At its most basic, modernity refers to the condition of living in a world reshaped by industrialization, urban growth, technological innovation, and the accelerating rhythms of modern life. It is not only a historical period, and it is not just another word for “recent.” Modernity names a broad transformation in how societies were organized and in how people experienced time, labor, movement, and everyday reality. In art history, the term is especially useful because it helps explain why nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists became so preoccupied with the present, with change, and with the unsettling experience of living in a world that no longer felt stable.¹

Industrialization sits at the center of this transformation. As production shifted from agricultural and craft-based systems toward mechanized labor, daily life changed dramatically. Factories reorganized work, clocks and schedules became more powerful, and economic life increasingly revolved around systems of production, circulation, and consumption. At the same time, cities expanded. Urban centers became defining spaces of modern life, bringing together crowds, commerce, transportation, labor, and spectacle in new ways. The modern city was not simply a backdrop for modernity; it was one of its clearest expressions.²

These changes altered how people understood both time and space. Railroads and steamships compressed distance. Print culture and later image culture sped up the circulation of information. Industrial labor broke time into measurable units, making life feel less tied to seasonal rhythms and more bound to schedules, efficiency, and repetition. Space also seemed to contract. Distant places became more connected to everyday life, not because geography changed, but because transportation, trade, and communication changed how distance was experienced. Modernity therefore did not just introduce new machines. It reorganized the very texture of lived experience.³

Just as importantly, modernity transformed social life. It unsettled older traditions and intensified newer structures of class, labor, and consumption. It expanded opportunity for some while deepening exploitation and alienation for others. It offered the excitement of novelty, but it also generated anxiety, instability, and a sense that the world was moving too quickly to be fully grasped. That tension is part of what makes modernity so important for the history of art and photography. Modernity was never simply a triumphal story of progress. It was also a story of dislocation, fragmentation, and uneven change.⁴

As an experience, modernity is often described through a cluster of recurring terms: speed, mobility, fragmentation, and change. Speed mattered because the modern world increasingly moved through trains, factories, newspapers, telegraphs, and later cameras and cinema. Mobility mattered because people, goods, and images circulated more widely than before. Fragmentation mattered because modern life often felt broken into parts: work and home, public self and private self, local experience and global systems. Change mattered because modernity rarely felt settled. It was experienced as continual upheaval, with each new invention or social shift making the world feel both exciting and unstable. MoMA has usefully described modernity as “the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent,” a phrase borrowed from Baudelaire that captures the sense of impermanence so central to modern life.⁵

This is exactly why photography matters so much in the story of modernity. Photography did not simply emerge during the modern era; it was one of the defining media of that era. As a machine-based form of image-making, photography belonged to the same world that produced locomotives, factories, and mass communication. It offered a new way of seeing: one mediated by technology, shaped by precision, and capable of fixing moments that seemed otherwise too fleeting to hold. From the beginning, photography was deeply connected to modern habits of observation, classification, documentation, and circulation. At the same time, it would also become a site of experimentation, interpretation, and aesthetic ambition.⁶

Modernity therefore produced not only new technologies and new cities, but also new visual habits. People were asked to look differently in the modern world. They had to navigate crowds, signage, storefronts, posters, newspapers, and an increasing flood of images. Looking became more active, but also more complicated. The eye had to adjust to motion, interruption, repetition, and visual overload. Photography became one of the key tools for managing, studying, and reimagining this transformed visual field. It helped modern people document their world, but it also helped teach them how to see it.⁷

For the history of photography, this matters enormously. Photography did not stand outside modernity and merely record it from a safe distance. It emerged within modernity, participated in its values and contradictions, and became one of its most influential visual languages. To understand photography’s development as both art and mass medium, we first have to understand the world that made such a medium possible: a world defined by movement, machinery, modern cities, and the restless search for new ways of seeing.⁸

Footnotes

1. “Modernism,” Tate, www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/modernism. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026
2. Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Haussmann the Demolisher and the Creation of Modern Paris,” Smarthistory, smarthistory.org/haussmann-the-demolisher-and-the-creation-of-modern-paris/. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.
3. “501: Motion and Illumination,” The Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/calendar/galleries/5384. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.
4. “Social Structures in the U.S.,” Smarthistory, smarthistory.org/social-structures-in-the-u-s/. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.
5. “501: Motion and Illumination,” The Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/calendar/galleries/5384. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.
6. Quentin Bajac, “The Age of Distraction: Photography and Film,” Object:Photo, The Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/assets/essays/Bajac.pdf. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.
7. “The Photographic Comportment of Bernd and Hilla Becher,” Tate Papers, no. 1, Tate, www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/01/photographic-comportment-of-bernd-and-hilla-becher. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.
8. “Modernism,” Tate; “501: Motion and Illumination,” The Museum of Modern Art. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.

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