Getty Museum

Liebe deinen Nächsten/ Mord auf den Schienen (Filmplakat)

Date

1925

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> The overlapping circles in this composition, which connote the range finder of a rifle, also suggest a fast breaking simultaneity of events, with a female sharp shooter and scenes from a railway station and a colonnade. Standing outside the circles, a female gymnast engaged in weightlifting is seemingly unaware of the gun trained at her chest. A network of precise pencil lines crosses and recrosses the page, creating a complicated web of connection. Unlike the traditional static picture, this superimposition of form was meant to “act upon the viewer in an exhilarating, touching, appalling satirical, visionary, revolutionary way,” as László Moholy-Nagy wrote in his 1928 essay “Fotografie ist Lichtgestaltung” (Photography is creation with light). No specific narrative is intended, but the artist was attempting to excite sensations in his audience, which would comprehend the work on an intuitive rather than cerebral level. > > Katherine Ware, *László Moholy-Nagy*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), 36. © 1995 The J. Paul Getty Museum.

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