Getty Museum

Fotogramm

Date

about 1928–1929

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

Object ID

f935b996-de92-4d04-ad2b-c992f802c267

> In the early 1920s László Moholy-Nagy’s Berlin studio was a popular gathering place for artists, including the Russian painter El Lissitzky and the Dadaists. In 1922 Moholy-Nagy attended the Dada-Constructivist Congress in Weimar. It seems likely that he would have heard of the work of Christian Schad, a Zurich Dadaist who in 1918 had made a series of small pictures directly on photosensitive paper (Schadographs), and that of Man Ray in Paris, whose suite of photograms (Rayographs) *Les champs délicieux* (The fields of delight) was published in 1922. Moholy-Nagy was not interested in making identifiable pictures of objects in his photograms; he sought instead to achieve abstract effects with everyday items. On the back of this dynamic image, which once belonged to the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, Moholy-Nagy identifies the compositional elements as two napkin rings and some wooden matches but also writes: “But is that important in the end? How the light flows in tracks and what becomes of the whole has nothing to do anymore with the original material.” Katherine Ware, *László Moholy-Nagy*, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), 12. © 1995 The J. Paul Getty Museum.

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