Laszlo Moholy-Nagy - In Focus Series

In 1937, painter, theorist, and photographer Moholy-Nagy brought his ideas and teaching to Chicago, where they influenced more than one generation of photographers. But his death at 51 cut off the stream of his work, and now photographers know his early writings on photography--he was the great twentieth-century theorist of the medium's possibilities--better than the images themselves. The Getty Museum corrects that situation by publishing 45 photographs with useful commentaries by curator Katherine Ware about his methods, themes, and social context. Moholy-Nagy wrote that the photogram (an image made on light-sensitive paper without a camera) was the most photographic work, yet his most interesting pieces are his fotoplastiks witty collages of photographic fragments set in imaginary spaces suggested by spare, geometric drawings. Twenty-five appear here and demonstrate Moholy-Nagy's ability to comment, with great visual elegance, on topics ranging from militarism and racism to sexual tension and marriage. The only cavil is that the small scale of reproduction here prevents easy reading of many of the details.