With their revolutionary reinvention of portraiture, above all, practitioners of the New Vision crystallized the metaphorical aim of an entire generation: to change the face of their time.
Cunningham's portrait of Gertrude Gerrish, who studied etching with Cunningham's husband Roi Partridge, has much in common with the starkly erotic compositions created by Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston in the preceding decade. Cunningham's highly unnatural camera angle, however, relates most directly to the modernist style propagated by members of the German art school, the Bauhaus (1919-1933). Close-up views from directly above or below and poses that suggest a casual intimacy with the photographer are hallmarks of this style. Bauhaus affiliates particularly favored views of their friends apparently asleep, as Gerrish is here, for their suggestion of revealing a dreamlike, inner character. The "New Vision," as this approach was termed, attained unprecedented visibility at the 1929 Film und Foto exhibition, a mammoth international survey of contemporary photography in which Cunningham took part. With their revolutionary reinvention of portraiture, above all, practitioners of the New Vision crystallized the metaphorical aim of an entire generation: to change the face of their time.