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Abstractions

The naturalistic painting style of the 18th and 19th centuries in the West has been all but replaced by photography. Beginning with Impressionism, painting has gone in a different direction, distancing itself further and further from a naturalistic point of view.

Photography has assumed the task of representing the world in a realistic way, but it has also freed itself from this limiting view of reality. For example, the work of photographers such as Alexander Rodchenko of Russia and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy of Hungary makes a point to extract photography from the convention of a naturalistic representation of reality. To date, many forms of abstraction have been used in photography. The abstract is disengaged from the concrete and ...

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