ABSTRACT
The author was born in Czechoslovakia and moved to Germany when she was eighteen. She wrote on photography during this period and continued to do so after emigrating to Britain in 1934. A Hundred Years of Photography was published as a Pelican Special to mark photography’s hundredth anniversary. It combines the impersonality of the specially commissioned survey with a very particular approach to photographic history - one informed by continental culture and the nexus of ideas and events within which photography developed. Photography has been adopted by a few abstract painters as a new medium by means of which they tried to give shape to their feelings of balance. A kind of mutual influence took place between photography and futurist painting. One of the features of futurism was the effort to represent, in one painting, events which took place in separate moments, or various aspects of the same object which in reality could not be obtained simultaneously.
