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Negotiating Photographic Modernism in USA: A Quarterly Magazine of the American Scene (1930)

This article examines the journal USA: A Quarterly Magazine of the American Scene as a microcosm of the complexity of meanings and positioning of photographic modernism in interwar America. Established in the spring of 1930, USA would survive for only three issues. Yet despite that short run, this Philadelphia-based journal of the arts featured an impressive roster of work from across the arts including contributions by William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Martha Graham, José Clemente Orozco, Isamu Noguchi and Richard Neutra. Within its pages, USA also prominently featured photographic representations by such canonical figures as Edward Weston, Walker Evans and Ralph Steiner as well as anonymous vernacular works. This article argues that USA's treatment of the photograph exemplifies photography's complex position during the interwar years as, on the one hand, an emergent medium of modernist art and, on the other, a favored form of commercial and popular expression.