Lazlo Moholy Nagy

 

MOHOLY - NAGY

(Ma-holy Nahg)

"Moholy-Nagy played a key role at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau as a painter, graphic artist, teacher, and impassioned advocate of avant-garde photography. He made this image without a camera by placing his hand, a paintbrush, and other objects on a sheet of photographic paper and exposing it to light. While this simple process was practiced by photography's founders in the nineteenth century and was later popularized as a child's amusement, avant-garde artists of the twentieth century revived the photogram technique as a means for exploring the optical and expressive properties of light. With this shadow image of a hand and paintbrush, Moholy-Nagy ambitiously suggests that photography may incorporate, and even transcend, painting as the most vital medium of artistic expression in the modern age." - Metmuseum.net

My take on Moholy Nagy:

His work in my opinion was innovative and not to be doubted revelutionary for the time in which he was doing this work. Nagy's work is often depicted to be child like with some form of meaning behind it, for instance the photo attached above shows a hand clasping a paint brush. This, being in a photo, is a paradoxical theme considering that the paintbrush symbolises painting and manual art, the twist being that this is a photograph of this. This photo was almost a middle finger to the pervious conceptions that art could only be made via the brush, as this photogram theoretically contradicts. Nagy's work was often deemed contravercial as his photographs pushed buttons and provoked reactions from the public. The hungarian who also was also a painter and a teacher was one of the first to publicise photography without cameras, pushing the boundaries of what was thought to be art at the time with new and interesting ways to look at things.

Moholy Nagy - July 20th 1895/ November 24th 1946