Modern Living
Scenes of urban bustle or new building constructions, frequently taken from unusual viewpoints, became very popular in the years around 1930.
With its high viewpoint , steep angle and the contrast it establishes between dominant technical structures and tiny masses of people, Viennese-born Edith Tudor-Hart’s Ferris Wheel at the Prater, 1928, trumpets its modernity in both subject matter and style. ‘New photography’ – meaning both pictures of modern subjects and emphatically modern pictures – functioned as an advertisement for modernity, rendering it acceptable in a region filled with anxieties over sudden and massive changes.
Many great talents of the international illustrated press came out of the central European ‘photomania’; Life magazine and the Parisian tabloid Vu, for example, are unthinkable without skilled photographers from central Europe, such as Martin Munkacsi or André Kertész (both born in Hungary).
