Page 43 - Studio International - July August 1975

effect of altering one's reading of the
image simply by inverting the light values
of the original print. His most
characteristic approach was to effect the
disorientation of space perception through
light and shadow contrasts or unexpected
perspectives (especially bird's eye or
worm's eye views), or to concentrate
attention on the surface quality of objects
or materials through close-ups. As
Benjamin, too, was to observe, an
enlargement from a photographic close-
up 'does not simply render more precise
what in any case was visible, though
unclear : it reveals entirely new structural
deformations of the subject'40. Moholy
found photography an ideal medium for
exploring his interest in 'facture', and the
now famous juxtaposition of two
anonymous photographs of a 13o year-old
resident of Minnesota and of a wrinkled
mouldy apple originally appeared in his
1929 bauhaus book Von Material zu
Architektur". (Readers of the English
edition, The New Vision, are
unfortunately spared the apple and half
the point.)
His own photographs of overflowing
drains, of oozing mud or of a pile of
G8 1926 fishbones present the material quality
Oil on front and rear surface of transparent Movie Camera: the montage of images of a surface in its own right by isolating
celluloid sheet and on opaque background, it from the context in which it would
4o x 49 cm. was to be entirely devoid of narrative naturally be seen. The pile of fishbones
Private Collection, Munich. content, each being defined by its impact
Photo: Bauhaus Archive, Berlin within the image sequence in which it might be anywhere, and it might be any
occurs and by its function in terms of the shape or size. All we see is the peculiar
shock tactics of the film as a whole. quality of these small jagged components
(especially by early silent montage). Moholy tended to single out situations as heaped up together, presented dense
But, whilst Benjamin was interested with a potential for the filmic and flat across the surface of the
above all in the political implications, exploitation of disorienting light effects, photographic print. A similar
Moholy thought about film first and and above all purely 'camera-eye' preoccupation with facture was to emerge
foremost in the context of its potential for situations : under a moving train; on a after 1930 in Polish Constructivist
exploring the medium of light. Film fairground big-dipper at the point when painting: Strzeminski's extraordinary
transcended the limitations of everyone closes their eyes on the little all-over compositions employing
photography in providing a challenge to switchback. In a station hall the camera textural impasto effects reminiscent of
manage the complexities of light and was to be turned in a continuous circle fabric weaves make an impact more
space in motion. Following in the wake of both horizontally and vertically (`our directly related to that of Moholy's
the Italian Futurists and of Gabo's head cannot do this'). The special value photographs than to anything in his own
Realistic Manifesto, Moholy was of the camera - whether in terms of (or anyone else's) earlier painting, which
convinced that the most complete forms photography or film - was to 'complete had worked with the relations between
of expression in his own age would prove or supplement our optical instrument, separate forms across the surface42. The
to be forms which worked in and with the eye'. For whereas the eye tended to closest visual analogy to Strzeminski's
the dimension of time. But he found perceive in accordance with mental `unistic compositions' is perhaps a
relatively little to impress him in the schema - expectation and ingrained photograph Moholy chose from a
cinema of the 'twenties, which struck him habit - the camera could produce a technical journal for reproduction in
as being arrested at an extremely `purely optical image'38. In another Von Material zu Architektur: a close-up
primitive stage in its evolution, aping the context, Moholy suggests an impractical showing dust as accumulated by the
narrative forms of traditional theatre and and (on the face of it) macabre study regular grid of a filter in a factory43.
the novel and showing little awareness of skin facture : the face of a single
`that the essential medium of the film individual was to be shot day by day,
is light not pigment'. Even montage frame by frame, revealing those changes
usually seemed to have been between childhood and old age which in
misunderstood: as the Russians used it, reality are too subtle to be experienced
the effect tended to be 'impressionistic as change. This particular use of film
rather than constructive', limited to is really an extension of Moholy's interest
individual sequences of striking effects in the serial use of photography, where
at the expense of the overall structure `the separate picture loses its identity
of the film as a totality36—though Moholy as such and becomes a detail of assembly,
repeatedly credited Vertov, among others, an essential structural element of the
with an effectively 'constructive' handling whole'. As a result, 'none of the canons of
of the medium. pictorial aesthetics can be applied to it'39.
Moholy's own films and film projects Moholy himself had only begun to use
of the 'twenties tended to seek filmic a camera once the photogram experiments
equivalents for various rhythms of urban were underway. His approach - which
existence (the only two to be completed had much in common with Rodchenko's
were shot in Berlin and Marseilles). - was to present the ordinary in a new
Dynamics of a Metropolis", a promising light, by whatever means occurred to
scenario written in Berlin in 1921-22 him. He was not inclined to make an Fishbones 1927
(and never filmed), shows that Moholy aesthetic point of manipulating the image Photograph, 24 X 20 cm.
started out with a conception that in the processing, except in the case of Folkwangschulen, Essen.
prefigures Vertov's 1929 Man with the positive-negative reversals, which had the Reproduction: Bauhaus Archive, Berlin

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