Florence Henri

Lucia Moholy

1927 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

In her 1939 history of photography, Lucia Moholy cited Russian films as one source of inspiration for the new portraiture that emerged in the 1920s: "To the general public in Western Europe this style appears strange and exotic. They find it interesting and worth discussing, but few of them wish to have their portraits taken in the same way." In this formidable portrait of Florence Henri, a Paris-based painter who enrolled in Moholy-Nagy's summer course in 1927, Lucia Moholy employed the kind of extreme close-up that had recently thrilled Berlin audiences in Sergei Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin (1925).

Artist

Lucia Moholy

Date

1927

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

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