Getty Museum

Photogram Number 1 - The Mirror

Date

negative 1925; print about 1928

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> An early photogram was probably used as a negative to print this imposing enlargement, which may have been made for the 1929 *Film und Foto* exhibition in Stuttgart. The artist sometimes exhibited his paintings and photographs together, and a print of this size would have commanded equal attention in such a context. The title refers to a mirror; it is possible that the shapes in this composition were made with a circular looking glass and its reflections. In his essay “Light: A Medium of Plastic Expression,” published in the American avant-garde periodical *Broom* in 1923, László Moholy-Nagy specifically refers to the use of lenses, mirrors, and other translucent objects to create gradations of light values rather than simple silhouettes. Of all his photographic work, this print perhaps achieves most fully Moholy’s goal of non-objective expression and is closest in spirit to the abstract paintings of the Russian artist and theorist Kazimir Malevich. > > Katherine Ware, *László Moholy-Nagy*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), 70. © 1995 The J. Paul Getty Museum.

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