13.10: Expanding Modernism- Photography Beyond the United States

Daidō Moriyama, Stray Dog, Misawa, 1971

Asia beyond Japan requires a wider lens, because its photographic histories are deeply shaped by decolonization and nation-building. Across South and Southeast Asia, photography was asked to do many things at once: document the end of colonial rule, picture new national subjects, support state narratives, and still remain connected to local visual cultures that did not simply disappear when independence arrived. That means postwar modernism in Asia cannot be reduced to one formal recipe. In some places documentary traditions remained strong, but they were inflected by local rituals of portraiture, press culture, vernacular studio practice, or regional ideas of public memory. The point is not that Asia followed Europe or America more slowly. The point is that photographic modernity there had to negotiate the political work of becoming postcolonial.

South America offers another important version of this expansion. Political upheaval, uneven modernization, dictatorship, and urban transformation all shaped the region’s photographic cultures. Smarthistory’s overview of Latin American modernisms stresses that the twentieth century in Latin America was marked by political change, social transformation, and artistic innovation, and that artists engaged international avant-gardes while addressing local conditions. That is exactly the balance that makes South American photography so important here. Its modernisms are often hybrid: formally inventive, politically alert, and unwilling to separate experiment from social conflict. In Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and elsewhere, photography could move between street life, conceptual intervention, documentary witness, and visual resistance.

That is why experiment and resistance so often overlap in South American photography. Under authoritarian regimes or in periods of social breakdown, the photograph could serve as evidence, memory, or protest, but it could also become something less straightforward: an interrupted archive, a manipulated surface, a conceptual gesture against official truth. Writing on Chile under dictatorship emphasizes that documentary photography and protest remain central to understanding the era, while MoMA’s essay on Paz Errázuriz shows how photography could challenge nationalism and authoritarian order by documenting lives and bodies that official culture preferred to marginalize. In other words, modernism here is not simply clean form. It is often form under pressure.

Urbes Mutantes Exhibition

Africa expands modernism in still another direction. In many African contexts, photography became central to studio modernism, urban photojournalism, and new forms of political visibility in the years surrounding independence. MoMA’s exhibition Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination frames portraiture in West and Central African cities as part of a broader political imagination linked to Pan-African solidarity. That is a crucial point. Studio photography was not simply commercial portraiture on the side of “real” modernism. It was one of the places where modern identity, style, aspiration, and political imagination became visible. Sitters fashioned themselves through clothing, pose, and gesture, and photographers helped create a visual language of freedom and self-definition.

Urban photojournalism mattered just as much. In places such as South Africa, the city became a stage on which Black modernity, apartheid violence, labor, style, and political struggle were all photographed with urgency. Drum magazine, for example, became a major platform for writers and photographers depicting Black urban life on its own terms. Photography here was not only aesthetic; it was a means of visibility under unequal conditions. To be photographed in the studio, on the street, in the magazine, or in the archive was to enter a struggle over who could appear publicly and how. That is why photography in Africa after the war is inseparable from politics, even when the image looks glamorous or intimate rather than overtly militant.

Malick Sidibé works at MoMA

Indigenous modernisms in North America and Central America are essential here because they challenge one of the deepest habits in photographic history: the habit of treating Indigenous people as subjects seen from outside. Modernity is too often imagined as something Indigenous communities are observed entering, resisting, or losing, rather than something they define from within. The language of visual sovereignty helps correct that. Smarthistory describes Will Wilson’s Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange as a contemporary reimagining of Native photographic representation that answers and revises the legacy of Edward Curtis. The term “visual sovereignty” is widely used to describe the right of Indigenous artists to determine their own forms of self-expression and representation. That shift matters enormously. It means photography is no longer just a record of Indigenous presence made by outsiders. It becomes a tool for Indigenous self-representation, critique, continuity, and refusal.

Seen this way, Indigenous modernism is not “tradition meeting modernity” in some outside observer’s narrative. It is modernity from within. Contemporary Indigenous photographers across North America have used portraiture, self-staging, archival intervention, and landscape to assert identity and autonomy on their own terms. The Carter Museum’s collection framing emphasizes the important contributions of Indigenous photographers across North America and highlights themes of sovereignty, community, and contemporary artistic practice. Those themes can also help us think more broadly across Central America, where Indigenous self-representation similarly asks who controls the image, the archive, and the right to appear. Once that question is in view, photography beyond the United States no longer looks like an appendix to modernism. It looks like one of the places where modernism is being most forcefully redefined.

Will Wilson, Citizens of the Navajo Nation

Taken together, these histories make one thing clear: modernism did not expand by becoming more uniform. It expanded by becoming less singular. In Japan, photography turned inward and then violently against objectivity. Across Asia, it was entangled with the visual work of decolonization. In South America, it became hybrid, experimental, and often resistant. In Africa, it moved through portraiture, journalism, and political visibility. In Indigenous North American and Central American contexts, it became a means of self-representation and sovereignty rather than outside classification. Once these histories enter the chapter, “modernism beyond the United States” stops sounding like a supplement. It becomes the real scale of the subject.

Footnotes

¹ International Center of Photography, Urbes Mutantes: Latin American Photography 1944–2013; Smarthistory, “Latin American Modernisms”; Museum of Modern Art, “Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination.”
² Museum of Modern Art, “Takuma Nakahira’s Photographs for the 1971 Paris Biennial”; International Institute for Asian Studies, Asia’s Colonial Photographies.
³ “Decolonizing South Asia through Heritage- and Nation-Building”; Christopher J. Lee, “Street Photography and the Bandung Myth”; International Institute for Asian Studies, Asia’s Colonial Photographies.
⁴ Smarthistory, “Latin American Modernisms”; International Center of Photography, Urbes Mutantes; Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, “Documentary Photography and Protest under Chile’s Dictatorship.”
⁵ Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, “Documentary Photography and Protest under Chile’s Dictatorship”; Museum of Modern Art, “Paz Errázuriz’s Archive of Sex and Gender Dissidence”; Arte al Día, “The Message Behind the Intervened Photographs of Marcelo Brodsky.”
⁶ Museum of Modern Art, “Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination.”
⁷ Museum of Modern Art, “Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination”; Duke University Press, “Street Photography, Public Visibility, and Afro-Modernity.”
⁸ Smarthistory, “Will Wilson, Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange”; “An Ethnographic Exploration of Visual Sovereignty”; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, “Contemporary Indigenous Photography.”
⁹ Amon Carter Museum of American Art, “Contemporary Indigenous Photography”; Cara Romero, exhibitions statement on Indigenous visual sovereignty; K. J. Martin, “Native Footprints: Photographs and Stories Written on the Land.”
¹⁰ International Center of Photography, Urbes Mutantes; Smarthistory, “Latin American Modernisms”; Museum of Modern Art, “Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination”; Smarthistory, “Will Wilson, Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange.”