The photographic experiments of the Surrealists and the Bauhaus Group had been interrupted by World War II. In the late 1940s in Germany, Otto Steinert and Peter Keetman founded the group fotoform. The artists of fotoform picked up where Bauhaus left off, becoming a second avant-garde. fotoform organised three exhibitions entitled "Subjektive Fotografie" in 1951, 1954 and 1958, and the movement spread internationally. Otto Steinert, Siegfried Lauterwasser, Ludwig Windstosser, Toni Schneiders, and Peter Keetman from the fotoform group were based in Germany. Kiyoshi Niiyama and Takashi Kijima were in Japan. Christer Strömholm was Swedish. Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind represented the American heritage of László Moholy-Nagy’s new Bauhaus, while Thomaz Farkas, Gaspar Gasparian, and Marcel Giró were part of the São Paulo school. Faced with controversy from the start, Steinert responded to his critics by saying that the experiments were a kind of visual research, and that they would be unpopular initially but would find an audience in the future.