13.6: Formal Modernism in the United States Context

In the context of the United States, formal modernism asked viewers to treat the photograph as a self-contained visual structure. That idea sounds simple, but it carried real weight. A photograph was not supposed to rely only on story, sentiment, or outside explanation. It was meant to hold together through its own internal organization—through the relationships between forms, tones, edges, and spatial tensions inside the frame. This way of thinking fit neatly with the broader modernist desire to define each art by its own distinctive properties. For photography, that meant emphasizing what the camera and print could do especially well: render detail, organize space, and make visual order feel meaningful in itself.¹

That emphasis produced a recognizable formal vocabulary. Line mattered because it directed the eye and stabilized movement through the image. Shape mattered because modernist photographers often reduced the visible world to relationships among forms rather than treating objects as merely descriptive subjects. Texture mattered because photography could translate surfaces—stone, skin, bark, fabric, metal—into tactile visual experience. Tonal range mattered because modernist prints often depended on carefully controlled gradations from deep black to luminous highlights. Precision mattered because sharpness was not just a technical virtue; it was taken as evidence of seriousness, discipline, and fidelity to the medium. In other words, the formal language of American modernism was not neutral. It was a system of values.²

The Museum of Modern Art played a decisive role in turning those values into canon. Once photography entered MoMA’s program in a sustained way, the question was no longer just whether photography could be art. The question became what kind of photography would stand for the medium at its highest level. Museums do not merely reflect taste; they organize it. Through exhibitions, publications, collecting, and interpretation, MoMA helped define which photographers mattered, which histories counted, and which visual qualities were most worthy of attention. Formal modernism benefited enormously from this institutional setting because it could be framed as rigorous, legible, and historically progressive.³

Beaumont Newhall was one of the key figures in that process. Before Edward Steichen took over the department in 1947, Newhall had already helped establish photography’s historical legitimacy within the museum. He served as MoMA’s first curator dedicated to photography and was central to the shaping of its early exhibitions and scholarship. His approach tended to emphasize photography as image and object, with careful attention to the medium’s formal and historical development. That mattered because it gave photography a lineage that museums could teach and defend. Newhall was not simply hanging pictures on walls. He was helping write the story of photography as a modern art.⁴

Edward Steichen shifted that story without abandoning institutional authority. When he succeeded Newhall in 1947, he organized more than forty exhibitions and broadened the department’s reach dramatically. Under Steichen, MoMA remained a central force in defining photography, but the terms changed. He was more open to scale, spectacle, and broader public address. If Newhall helped establish photography as a serious modern medium within the museum, Steichen helped demonstrate that it could command mass audiences on an extraordinary scale. His exhibitions extended the museum’s authority outward, making photography feel both culturally elevated and publicly accessible.⁵

That shift reaches its clearest form in The Family of Man from 1955. The exhibition assembled 503 photographs by 273 photographers from 68 countries and grouped them around universal themes such as birth, labor, love, children, and death. After its New York presentation, it circulated internationally on an immense scale. The show was not just an exhibition of photographs. It was an argument about humanity, about common experience, and about the capacity of photography to build a global public language after the trauma of World War II. In that sense, the exhibition itself became a form of public rhetoric. It asked viewers not simply to look at individual images, but to move through a curated emotional and ideological sequence.⁶

That is why The Family of Man matters so much to a discussion of formal modernism in the American context. On one hand, it expanded far beyond narrow formalism. Its organizing principle was humanist content more than medium-specific purity. On the other hand, it shows how deeply formal modernist institutions shaped public meaning. The exhibition depended on sequencing, scale, installation design, and visual comparison. It used photographs not just as documents but as structured elements in an overarching aesthetic and ideological composition. In other words, even when the subject was “humanity,” the museum still taught viewers how to see through formal arrangement.⁷

Beaumont Newhall himself later described The Family of Man as “an enormous picture story” and even compared it to “a big Life magazine spread.” That observation is useful because it reminds us that MoMA’s canon-making was never as tidy as textbook summaries sometimes suggest. Formal modernism and mass communication were not separate worlds. They overlapped. The museum borrowed from editorial sequencing and public spectacle even as it claimed cultural authority. That tension helps explain why American photographic modernism could be both refined and populist, both medium-conscious and broadly ideological.⁸

So formalism in the American context was never just about clean prints and elegant compositions. It was also an ideological position. It treated visual order as meaningful, assumed that disciplined seeing could produce serious knowledge, and often presented its preferences as if they were universal standards rather than historically situated values. That gave formalism enormous persuasive power, especially in museums and classrooms. But it also meant that questions of taste, authority, and exclusion were always present, even when they were hidden behind the language of clarity.⁹

Seen this way, American formal modernism was built not only in the darkroom or the camera club, but also in the museum, the catalogue, and the exhibition route. MoMA helped make the photographic canon by selecting which histories to honor, which styles to legitimize, and which ways of seeing to elevate. Newhall and Steichen did this differently, but both were institutional forces. Together, they helped establish the conditions under which formal modernism could appear not as one approach among many, but as the natural language of serious photography.¹⁰

Footnotes

¹ Quentin Bajac et al., Photography at MoMA: 1920 to 1960, Museum of Modern Art, 2015; Beaumont Newhall, “Photography: 1839–1937,” Museum of Modern Art, 1937. (The Museum of Modern Art)

² Bajac et al.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Group f/64,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. (The Museum of Modern Art)

³ Bajac et al.; Sarah Meister, “Now Is the Time to Read Photography Books,” MoMA Magazine, 27 May 2020. (The Museum of Modern Art)

⁴ Bajac et al.; Sarah Meister; “Beaumont Newhall Interview,” MoMA Oral History, 2018. (The Museum of Modern Art)

⁵ “Edward Steichen Archive,” Museum of Modern Art Archives; Bajac et al. (The Museum of Modern Art)

⁶ “Edward Steichen at The Family of Man, 1955,” Museum of Modern Art Archives; “The Family of Man opened to the public on January 24, 1955,” MoMA Inside/Out; Museum of Modern Art press materials, 1959. (The Museum of Modern Art)

⁷ Bajac et al.; “Edward Steichen at The Family of Man, 1955”; “Artifact or Idea? Photography in the Modern Museum,” Museum of Modern Art. (The Museum of Modern Art)

⁸ “Beaumont Newhall Interview,” MoMA Oral History, 2018; Bajac et al. (The Museum of Modern Art)

⁹ Bajac et al.; Sarah Meister. (The Museum of Modern Art)

¹⁰ “Edward Steichen Archive,” Museum of Modern Art Archives; Beaumont Newhall, “Photography: 1839–1937”; Sarah Meister. (The Museum of Modern Art)

---