The Metropolis and Desire: Modernist Photobooks

The interwar period in Europe marked a transformative era for the medium of photography, characterised by the emergence of unconventional subjects and innovative practices driven by advancements in camera and film technology. Modernist photographers harnessed the expressive potential of the medium, experimenting with new perspectives and vantage points in response to the modern metropolis, made possible by the development of compact cameras such as the Leica. The period also saw the exploration of abstracted or fragmented forms through techniques and aesthetics enabled by photograms and photomontage, as seen in the New Vision experiments of László Moholy-Nagy, who sought to capture the intangible forces of the fourth dimension. In contrast, others gravitated towards a more unsentimental and objective approach, grounded in close observation of the modern metropolis through the principles of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement in Germany. The Surrealist movement also attracted numerous photographers who sought to visually articulate the realm of the psyche, dreams and eroticism.

Despite the progress of the avant-garde, many photographers sustained their practice through a combination of artistic, photojournalistic and commercial pursuits, such as those enabled by publishing, as a way to navigate the complex economic, social, and political realities of the time. We can see this in the work of Berenice Abbott, Germaine Krull and Claude Cahun, who sought to supplement their income by various means, including publishing their work in photobooks as a deliberately ‘media-savvy innovation’ within the emerging photographic economy.¹Matthew S. Witkovsky, Foto: Modernity in Central
Europe, 1918–1945, Thames & Hudson, 2007, p. 76 Photobooks emerged as a radical format that facilitated the widespread dissemination of modernist aesthetics through either bespoke or commercial printers and publishers. Abbott, Krull and Cahun, along with numerous other photographers worldwide, embraced the growing popularity of photobooks, a phenomenon that coincided with photography’s increasing significance in the illustrated press, magazines and journalism. Photobooks also offered photographers unprecedented ways to share their work beyond studios or exhibitions, while also reaching a broader public to circulate social, cultural or political material.

The photobook inevitably played a pivotal role in shaping modernist ideas and practices across both the literary and visual arts

Starting her career as a sculptor, American artist Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) was already immersed in the American avant-garde with artists such as Marcel Duchamp before she moved to Paris in 1918 and became Man Ray’s studio assistant. It was there that Abbott established herself as a notable portrait photographer, cultivating a friendship with the elusive Eugène Atget and contributing to the preservation of his photographic archive. When Abbott returned to New York in 1929, she found a newly modernised city and, like Atget in Paris, she endeavoured to document the transformation of the urban environment. Abbott compiled the photographs from this period into a personal photo album, consisting of 266 prints, now housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

In her 1932 proposal to the New York Historical Society, Abbott extended this project as a means to earn an income during the Great Depression by asserting that ‘the camera alone can catch the swift surfaces of the cities today and speaks a language intelligible to all’.²Hank O’Neal, Berenice Abbott: American Photographer,
McGraw-Hill, New York, 1982, pp. 16–17. The New
York Public Library holds a substantial number of
prints from the project available online through their
digital collections. The initiative resulted in the acclaimed photographic series Changing New York (NGV Foundation, 2022), funded by the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1938, which subsequently evolved into an exhibition and photobook. Throughout the series, Abbott drew on modernist aesthetics to capture the changing face of the city, such as employing straightforward, objective photographic techniques along the lines of Walker Evans, while also integrating oblique views and extreme angles that demonstrated her visual dexterity.

Like Abbott’s exploration of urban modernity, Germaine Krull’s photobook Métal (Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2023), published in 1928, similarly foregrounded the modern industrial metropolis. Although Krull’s career spanned photography and film across Europe, Africa and Asia, she experimented extensively with multiple exposures and photomontage during the Weimar period. This is evident in Métal, in which she employed multiple exposures to convey the kinetic qualities of industrial objects, such as machines and bicycle parts, as a response to the industrial aesthetic of modern life. Commissioned by VU magazine in 1928, her photographs of the Eiffel Tower, eleven of which are included in Métal, feature oblique angles as she aimed her camera skywards through the tower’s structural spine, capturing the dynamic pattern of iron, light and shadows.³Kim Sichel, ‘Contortions of technique: Germaine Krull’s experimental photography’, in Mitra Abbaspour, Lee Ann Daffner & Maria Morris Hambourg (eds), Object. Photo: Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection 1909–1949. An Online Project of The Museum of Modern Art. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014, http://www.moma.org/ interactives/objectphoto/assets/essays/Sichel.pdf>
accessed 9 Oct. 2025. It’s the kind of vertiginous view one can only achieve by climbing the staircase and observing the structure from varied vantage points.⁴ibid.

Métal consists of sixty-four numbered, unbound collotype prints mounted on thick board, loosely held together within the covers by a tied ribbon. The reader can rearrange the order of the prints at will, offering a uniquely haptic experience that reflects Krull’s engagement with the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein’s principles of film montage. According to Kim Sichel, Krull actively adopted Eisenstein’s concept of rupture in Métal, employing visual counterpoints across and within images, resulting in ‘graphic, planar, volumetric, and spatial conflicts’.⁵bid. Double exposures also surface in Krull’s erotic photobook Études de nu (Nude Studies) from 1930, as an exploration of Sapphic desire through a series of intimate nude photogravures that share the unbound structure of Métal. These doubled images animate the depiction of writhing female bodies, whereas in others the figures are severely cropped to emphasise the curvaceous form and texture of flesh.

Queer female sexuality is likewise foregrounded in Claude Cahun’s photobook, Aveux non avenus (Shaw Research Library, acquired through the Friends of the Gallery Library endowment, 2017), published in 1930. The title, with its ambiguous translations as Disavowals, Denials or Cancelled Confessions, reflects the work’s oblique poetic and aphoristic nature. Accompanying the book’s Surrealist writings are collages created by Cahun’s life partner, fellow writer Marcel Moore (1892–1972). These collages blend elements of Claude’s photographs, yielding a series of doubled Surrealist imaginaries of her own complex and performative identities. While distinctly Surreal in their aesthetic presentation of the doubled figure, the images evoke an autobiographical tone that resonates with their doubled lives. Both Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore serve as pseudonyms that obscure traditional naming conventions, gender identities and the nature of their same-sex relationship. The book’s title, together with the Surrealist text and vivid imagery, alludes to familial complexities, referencing Cahun’s literary family, including her institutionalised mother and lifelong partnership and collaboration with her stepsister Suzanne Malherbe.⁶Maggie Finch & Isobel Crombie, ‘Claude Cahun’, NGV
Magazine, no. 17, July–August 2019, p. 34. Cahun’s often ambiguously androgynous and doubled figure points to the complexities of mutable identity, made fantastical by Moore’s collage effects.⁷Claude Cahun was born Lucy Schwob and Marcel
Moore’s original name was Suzanne Malherbe.

Each of these innovative photobooks provides the reader with an intimate, tactile experience shaped by the artists themselves. Often overlooked in art history due to narratives emphasising male practitioners, these artists have been rediscovered by curators and academics to attract new audiences. Nearly a hundred years later, they present a distinctive vision of modernity and a personal perspective that continues to resonate today.

Dr Donna West Brett is an Associate Professor and Chair of Art History at the University of Sydney.

This essay was first published for NGV Magazine Issue 55 | Nov–Dec 2025.

Notes