Photogram.

Moholy-Nagy was a central figure at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau from 1923 to 1928 and at the New Bauhaus (later the Institute of Design) in Chicago from 1937 until his death. Both as an artist and as an educator, Moholy-Nagy used photography as a means of challenging conventions of visual perception and representation. Among the methods he advocated to promote the "new vision" was the cameraless photograph or photogram - at once the most direct and the most oblique of translations from object to photograph. Moholy-Nagy made this abstract image by resting commonplace objects on a sheet of photographic paper and exposing it to light.

The legacy of Hungarian artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy is among the most cherished in the lineage of photographic art, and he can be defined as a visionary whose radical experiments with photography entirely re-imagined the possibilities for the medium. Working in the early 20th century when photography was not considered a form of high art, Moholy-Nagy actively sought to break down boundaries and find new languages of photographic discourse. In doing so, he left behind an oeuvre of visual ideas that have provided artistic license to a century’s worth of photographers to experiment boldly beyond the conventional definitions of what photography is expected to be.

Edition: 1 of 1