The Typist

Anton Giulio Bragaglia

1911 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

At the age of nineteen, before he began his career as a theater director, set designer, and cinematographer, Bragaglia became greatly influenced by F. T. Marinetti, the founder of the Italian Futurist movement who espoused a love of danger, the beauty of speed, and the interdependence of time and space. Bragaglia soon extended this radically modern position to photography and sought to replace the frozen appearance of an instantaneous snapshot with a projection of the subject's dynamism, or interior essence. To accomplish his aesthetic goals, he left his camera's shutter open to register the absolute fluidity of motion itself-in this case, the fluttering of fingers across the keys of a typewriter. The result is a dissolution or dematerialization of the typist in a seamless picture of active life.

Artist

Anton Giulio Bragaglia

Date

1911

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005