The New Vision: Photography Between the Wars by Maria Morris Hambourg and Christopher Phillips.

Ford Motor Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. MMA/Abrams, 1994, 1st softcover edition, fine with custom made 4-mil polyester jacket. [Large, impressive, 318 page catalog of the exhibition that opened in 1989, previously issued in hardcover only.] Photographers include Laszlo Moholy-Nagy; Man Ray; Paul Strand; Andre Kertesz; Charles Sheeler; Florence Henri; Maurice Tabard; Margaret Bourke-White; Berenice Abbott; Alfred Stieglitz; Paul Outerbridge; Edward Steichen; Laura Gilpin; Henri Cartier-Bresson; Brassai; Arthur Siegel; John Heartfield; Raoul Ubac; Walker Evans; Lewis Hine; Ben Shahn; Dorothea Lange; Hannah Hoch; Martin Munkacsi; Werner Mantz; Franz Roh; Alexander Rodchenko; Albert Renger-Patzsch; Germaine Krull; Herbert Bayer; August Sander; Christian Schad; Ira Martin, et al.  Another copy, paperback edition bound with original covers in orange cloth, ex-library.  Summary:

he New Vision: Photography Between the World Wars (1989), co-authored by Maria Morris Hambourg and Christopher Phillips, is a comprehensive art historical study and exhibition catalog. Drawing entirely from the Ford Motor Company Collection, the book explores how the medium underwent a radical, avant-garde transformation during the interwar period.

Key Themes & Highlights

• Rejection of Pictorialism: The authors document how a new generation of photographers decisively turned away from the soft-focus, painterly aesthetic of pre-WWI pictorialism. Instead, they embraced the mechanical nature of the camera as the perfect tool to mirror the speed, fragmentation, and geometry of modern industrial life.

• The "New Vision" Aesthetic: Named after the philosophy of Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy, the book illustrates how artists utilized bold, unconventional grammar. This included extreme bird's-eye and worm's-eye viewpoints, unexpected diagonal framing, photograms, multiple exposures, and dynamic photomontages.

• Intersection with Avant-Garde Movements: The text examines how the photographic medium intertwined with major European art movements of the 1920s and 1930s—including Dadaism, Constructivism, Surrealism, and the Bauhaus school—showing how artists used the camera to subvert traditional perception.

• Global Innovations: The book features work from a diverse, international roster of masters such as Man Ray, Alexander Rodchenko, Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, and Edward Weston, charting how these artists fundamentally built our modern culture's visual sense of itself.