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New Histories of Photography 6

Expanding Vision: László Moholy-Nagy’s Experiments of the 1920s

On view from
March 12 through
May 30, 2004

Media Preview:
Thursday March 11, 2004
9:30-11 am
R.S.V.P. info@icp.org

László Moholy-Nagy
Jealousy (Eifersucht), 1927
Photomontage
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York

New York, NY--- One of the great innovators of the European avant-garde, László
Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) is best known for his affiliation with the famous Bauhaus
school in Germany, where he taught from 1923-28. Moholy-Nagy experimented widely
with photography during these years, and developed a theoretical approach known as
the 'New Vision,' a method of using the medium to expand his audience’s knowledge
and perception. A selection of fifteen works from the comprehensive collection of the
George Eastman House, this exhibition will include examples from all aspects of the
artist’s photographic output from the 1920s, including unique photograms and original
photomontages, which have not been seen in New York in over twenty years. The exhibi-
tion will also showcase the film, Lichtspiel schwarz-weissgrau (Lightplay black-white-
gray) (1930), the culmination of the artist’s abstract experiments of the previous decade.
This is the sixth in the collaborative series New Histories of Photography, organized by
ICP and the George Eastman House.

Moholy-Nagy was a bold formal experimenter, and he firmly believed these various uses
of photography would engage the viewer in the experience of modernity. He transformed
the material of modern urban life—buildings, bridges, city streets, and boats— by
presenting it in new and jarring ways. Moholy-Nagy laid out the crux of the New Vision
in his seminal text on photography, Painting, Photography, Film (1925/27): “The camera
offered us amazing possibilities, which we are only just beginning to exploit. The visual
image has been expanded and even the modern lens is no longer tied to the narrow
limits of our eye; no manual means of representation is capable of arresting fragments
of the world seen like this.”

This philosophy also extended to Moholy-Nagy's alternative processes of photography:

photograms, film, and photomontages. He began collaborating with his wife, Lucia, on
photograms in 1922. These abstract images of objects exposed onto light-sensitive
paper were, in his eyes, a new creative means, and linked to the extension of vision
into the areas of x-rays and spectography. His interest in kinetic light effects found
the ultimate expression in his Light-Space Modulator, a sculpture he developed from
1922-1930, and the subject of the Lichtspiel film.

Moholy-Nagy’s transformations of “fragments of the world” in his photomontages are his

consummate melding of social issues and formal experimentation. He drew underlying
structures for the compositions, onto which he pasted bits of magazines, photographs,
and even his own negatives. Circus performers, political and military figures, sporting
events, and the liberated 'New Woman' of the Weimar Republic populate these mon-
tages, composed into social critiques and humorous parodies.

Taken together, Moholy-Nagy’s experiments of the 1920s demonstrate a fully developed

avant-garde strategy to increase awareness of the dynamism of modern life through the
medium of photography.

Expanding Vision is curated by Vanessa Rocco, and will be accompanied by a fully

illustrated brochure. This exhibition is presented in collaboration with the George
Eastman House, Rochester, New York, and is the sixth in the series New Histories of
Photography. It is made possible by the generous support of The Horace W. Goldsmith
Foundation.

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