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. This exhibition is currently on display at the International Center of Photography in New York City.

A selection of fifteen works from the comprehensive collection of George Eastman House, this exhibition includes 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 exhibition also showcases 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 George Eastman House.

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 montages, 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.

This exhibition is presented in collaboration with George Eastman House 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.

International Center of Photography