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June 6, 2010
In a review of some recent books on the Bauhaus at the New York Review of Books by Martin Filler makes some comments about photography in relation to Moholy-Nagy:
Since the inception of photography, artists had been attempting to use this archetypically modern medium to achieve effects that would validate it as the equal of painting, a quest epitomized by Edward Steichen’s heavily handworked Imagist landscape photos of the early 1900s. Conversely, Moholy rejected prevalent pictorial conventions in photography and began to use the as yet underexploited mechanical po- tential of the medium to “paint” abstractions directly on film, instead of trying to capture nature through a lens at a distance. In doing so he extended the nineteenth-century practice of photographing objects on flat surfaces, as William Henry Fox Talbot did with pieces of lace and Anna Atkins with botanical specimens, a cameraless method in which objects were placed on light-sensitive paper and exposed in silhouette.
Filler adds that Moholy’s innovative photograms were often printed in the white-on-black tones of a negative and thus evinced the ghostly aura and scientific exactitude of the X-ray. Along with a great many silhouetted everyday objects, both instantly recognizable and puzzlingly abstract, human hands figure in several of Moholy’s photograms. But rather than summoning up medical associations they strike an atavistic note not unlike handprints in prehistoric cave paintings.
The expressive manipulation of photographic imagery—including the composite photomontages—opened up new worlds of abstraction— nonrepresentational---photography. In viewing all mediums with fresh eyes, the Bauhaus made the old new again.
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