Photograghy artist research László Moholy–Nagy Photograms

László Moholy–Nagy  Photograms

Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy sums up the spirit of the avant-gardes of the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century. He was an innovative painter, sculptor, photographer, film-maker, designer, typographer, art theoretician, stage designer, industrial designer, and teacher. While teaching at the Bauhaus, he was a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts.

One of Moholy–Nagy's main focuses was photography. He believed that photography could create a whole new way of seeing the outside world that the human eye could not. He experimented with the photographic process of exposing light sensitive paper with objects overlain on top of it, called photogram.

The photogram was invented at the same time as photography in the early 19th century. It is a photographic image made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light. The result is a negative shadow image that shows variations in tone that depends upon the transparency of the objects used. Areas of the paper that have received no light appear white; those exposed through transparent or semi-transparent objects appear grey.

Moholy-Nagy used two methods of production: the first consisted of placing the objects directly on a special photographic paper and exposing the whole thing to natural or artificial light: after a time the contours and shadows of the object left light surfaces on a dark background on the support. The second took place in a dark-room where the evolution of the forms is no longer visible in real time, and the result could only be observed after developing and fixing the test.

Moholy-Nagy experimented with the stark and unexpected effects of negative imaging. He juxtaposed simple recognisable objects, varying the exposure time with different objects within a single image, as well as moving objects as they were exposed to the light. The photogram technique allowed him to explore the optical and expressive properties of light. Moholy-Nagy tried to capture light from the best angles and intensities. Eventually, he stopped using opaque objects, using instead translucent materials such as crystal, glass, liquids, and veils. He often superimposed these to accentuate the effects of the contrast of grains and textures.

Moholy-Nagy's photograms, despite originally being images of common objects, are clearly part of abstract art. He transforms them so they become non-figurative, arranged in such a way that they have no relationship with the real world. The photogram is not a copy, but rather a transmutation of an image, and most importantly, a study of the phenomenon of light. It is as Moholy-Nagy said, all about " the shaping of light", and playing with pure forms.

The multilayered processes used by Moholy-Nagy in his photograms in many ways represent his (then radical) views that new technologies, such as film and photography, would dissipate the divisions between different artforms, and this in turn would lead the way to a new world of experience.