Fotogramm

László Moholy-Nagy

1926 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

Moholy-Nagy played a key role at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau as a painter, graphic artist, teacher, and impassioned advocate of avant-garde photography. He made this image without a camera by placing ordinary objects, including his hand and a paintbrush, on a sheet of photosensitized paper and exposing it to light. While this simple process was practiced by photography's founders in the nineteenth century and was later popularized as a child's amusement, avant-garde artists in the twentieth century revived the photogram technique as a means for exploring the optical and expressive properties of light. With this shadow-image of a hand and paintbrush, Moholy-Nagy ambitiously suggests that photography may incorporate, and even transcend, painting as the most vital medium of artistic expression in the modern age.

Artist

László Moholy-Nagy

Date

1926

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987