Getty Museum

Untitled Photogram

Date

about 1923

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> László Moholy-Nagy considered himself foremost a painter but became intensely interested in the creative possibilities of photography in the early 1920s, after emigrating from his native Hungary to Germany. He began his experiments with the medium around 1922 in collaboration with Lucia Moholy (the former Lucia Schulz), whom he met in 1920 and married in 1921. This photogram appeared in his important 1925 publication *Maleri, Photographie, Film* (Painting, photography, film) and bears a close affinity to his paintings of this period, in which he strove to eliminate shapes reminiscent of nature and sought to explore the relationships of light, color, and nonobjective form. With photograms, Moholy could actually make a picture with light, by bringing objects or shadows in contact with light-sensitive photographic paper, which he exposed to a light source. “The organization of light and shadow effects produce a new enrichment of vision,” he wrote in the caption to this piece. The objects used to make the shapes produce a dematerialized and otherworldly effect. Katherine Ware, *László Moholy-Nagy*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), 10. © 1995 The J. Paul Getty Museum.

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