Lotte's Eye

During the 1920s, photographers pursued many strategies to push the medium beyond the accepted norms of photographic representation—images made without a camera, “bird’s eye” and “worm’s eye” perspectives, negative prints, and chemical manipulations, for instance. Here, Max Burchartz’s radical cropping transformed an utterly banal portrait of a freckle-faced young girl in a sweater and felt hat into an emotionally engaging, graphically powerful, and boldly modern image.