The Modern Look and the Strangeness Effect

Abstract

This paper focuses on a specific characteristic of the modern photograph, the strangeness effect. It seeks to retrace the paths taken since it was incorporated in the photograph, becoming a remarkable aesthetic feature to Russian and German vanguards of the interwar, until it was fully established as part of a modern visual lexicon. At the same time, its progressive loss of political intention as it was incorporated in the visual culture during the second half of the 20^th century is stressed.