Getty Museum

City Lights

Date

about 1928

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> The German avant-garde harbored a great enthusiasm for American cinema, particularly the work of Charlie Chaplin, whose “clown spectacles” appealed to László Moholy-Nagy. Here the Little Tramp figure, taken from a film still from Chaplin’s 1928 movie *Circus*, stands on tiptoe and peeps into a mechanical contraption that projects a series of trapezoidal light rays. At the top of the composition, two smiling women in bathing costumes are apparently enjoying their vantage point. In the original montage at the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin, the rays are painted in colors and the figures are halftone reproductions from popular magazines. > > Moholy-Nagy’s involvement with film began in the 1920s, when he promoted the medium as perhaps an ideal one for modern creative expression. He may have felt an affinity with the wordless yet eloquent medium of silent film, since his own work relied on the viewer’s visual literacy. It is possible that he gave this work its title after the release of Chaplin’s 1931 challenge to the talkies, *City Lights: A Comedy Romance in Pantomime.* > > Katherine Ware, *László Moholy-Nagy*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), 72. © 1995 The J. Paul Getty Museum.

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