In the 1920s, the photographers of the new vision, László Moholy-Nagy (influenced by the Bauhaus), Alexandre Rodtchenko and El Lissitzky (influenced by constructivism), affirmed the primacy of formal research, particularly through graphic research and audacious framing that could go as far as abstraction. This movement was born in Germany in the 1920s and then spread. The new vision is characterized by an interest in the specificity of the medium and in graphic experiments. Germaine Krull participates in the search for audacious points of view.
Several aspects attract László Moholy-Nagy to the new medium of photography. First of all, it is undoubtedly its mechanical nature. Like many of his contemporaries, Moholy-Nagy was indeed fascinated by the new technical and industrial world; defining art as an agent of permanent improvement of human perception, he considered it the duty of the modern artist to integrate the contributions of technical progress. However, the main quality he credits to mechanical media is to rid artistic creation of manual mediation and subjective imprint.
Photography, product of a physico-chemical process more guided by the artist than truly created by him, would thus finally give access to a “pure optical image”, to an “objective vision” pre-existing to any culture and any subjectivity, freeing our eyes from the veil of habit and knowledge. László Moholy-Nagy was a Bauhaus Master from 1923 to 1928.
The new vision: Working with light
But a second characteristic attracts Moholy-Nagy even more to photography, and that is his ability to work directly with the most elementary, but also the most immaterial of mediums: light. For the first time, the photographer would have the opportunity to make light a means of creation in its own right, in the same way as color in painting or sound in music. The essential element of his technique would thus not be the camera, but the photosensitive layer, and his primary mission would be less the reproduction of external objects than the production of luminous compositions organized directly on paper, which Moholy-Nagy calls the photogram.
The specificity of Photography
For László Moholy-Nagy, since its creation (~1830), Photography has not experienced any real revolutions in its applications, and it has functioned, in some way, subordinated to Painting. The novelty contained in the photographic medium (the possibilities of the photosensitive surface), has been slow to be seen, because the past (the subordination to Painting) has obstructed it.
Indeed, Moholy-Nagy refers to “the photo-sensitivity of a chemically treated surface (glass, metal, paper, celluloid, etc.)” , as a basic principle of photography. This principle has been neglected in the past, due, among other things, to the presence of the camera obscura. The latter implies the introduction of the laws of optics and perspective, through which the photographic medium would be reduced to the function of servile reproduction of reality.
Welcome “Objectivity”
In the pictorial context, the image follows a subjective interpretation of reality operated by the painter during the realization of the work. Conversely, with Photography one would be able to capture reality in a more objective way. Thus, the image would no longer be a vehicle through which a subjective vision of reality is suggested to us.
The author argues that photography has been used in the past “in a second way” (p.104), and that part of photographic production has been neglected. For example, there are the shots considered as “failures” (top view, bottom view, bias, etc.), but which nevertheless constitute images of “pure optics” thanks to the objectivity introduced by the photographic medium.
According to a discourse that is not exempt from a certain form of metaphysics, the author defines one of the main roles of Art as a discipline, namely that of providing “relations still unknown ” (p.105) capable of stimulating the “functional apparatuses ” (p.105) of which men are made up. This approach, with an evolutionary vocation, would make it possible to reinforce the effectiveness of all possible actions.
Photography as a free experience
Always according to the author, the photographic medium must therefore be rethought as a field of experimentation, and a potential source of unprecedented graphic production. Moholy-Nagy proposes the process of the photogram, which consists in carrying out a work of light shaping, without or with a camera, in order to capture the result on the photosensitive support. The light is thus taken into account as the material of a plastic activity.
The Photography advocated by Moholy-Nagy is thus freed from the past, and faced with a new horizon of creative experimentation. It is thanks to this new challenge that Photography can reach the status of Art, being “capable of transmitting to us the inexhaustible miracle of life” (p.110).
With the photographic discipline considered in this new way, the image as representation can be brought to a “degree of perfection never before achieved by handcrafted (manual) means” (p.110).
According to the author, each art form must be “clearly aware” of its own means (p.111), in order to participate in the mutual stimulation resulting from the interactions between disciplines.
Moholy-Nagy foresees a very rich set of creative possibilities for the photographic medium (montages, typophoto, simultaneous cinema, etc.), but he points out that it will take some time for artists to appropriate these new creative tools.
The New Vision: the past future of photography
This would be the beginning of the great luminous art of the future, an art that he dreams of extending to space on the one hand, in moving and colourful abstract projections, and to the borders of the invisible on the other hand, with the fixation of luminous undulations not accessible to the human eye. Served by an innate sense of pedagogy and publicity and hammered into numerous articles, Moholy-Nagy’s ideas will have considerable influence in the second half of the decade. His position as a master thinker of modernist photography was maintained until 1929, when he was called upon to organize the introductory hall of the Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart.
Bibliography
- pages numbers refers to the essay if Moholy-Nagy Peinture, Photography, Film, 1924.
- The New Vision: Fundamentals of Bauhaus Design, Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, László Moholy-Nagy and Daphné M. Hoffmann, 1925.
- Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, et al, 1919-1923
- https://www.christies.com/features/Laszlo-Moholy-Nagy-8250-1.aspx
- https://www.moma.org/artists/4048
- https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/ressources/personne/cMedBeq
- https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/nvis/hd_nvis.htm