Together, these three exhibitions are as powerful a demonstration of the appeal of modernist photography as one could conceive.

Just what makes modernist art in general, and modernist photography in particular, seem so appealing today?

But perhaps the clearest indication of the new-found interest in modernist photography lies in the recent return to abstraction.

Before his death in 1992, Cowin had amassed almost 5,000 photographs, ranging from African-American vernacular images to modernist photography between the world wars.

Equally well timed was the retrospective of Berenice Abbott's quintessentially modernist photography organized by the New York Public Library and shown there in the fall.

Yet for Sudek, the dislocated perspectives and geometric forms of European modernist photography were essentially alien.

His subject is Mexico, but he is also coming out of an international cosmopolitan tradition of modernist photography and modernism in general.

Like Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the grand old man of modernist photography in Latin America, all are clear-eyed and unsentimental about what they capture on film.

Her portraiture was unusual within exhibitions of modernist photography held in 1928-9 in Brussels and Germany.

The river series could be taken for a type of modernist, formalist photography like Edward Weston's.