Text in German, English, and French. Edited with an introduction by Franz Roh. 60 half-tones from photographs, photomontages, and photograms by László Moholy-Nagy. 25x18 cm (9¾x7"), pictorial wrappers. Design and typography by Jan Tschichold. First Edition.
Moholy-Nagy's first photography monograph. A seminal work in the “New Vision” movement edited by Franz Roh. First in a Fototek series in which eight volumes were planned but only two produced. László Moholy-Nagi (1895-1946) was among modernist photography's most vocal theorists and ideologues, and a tireless explorer of its outer limits. In 1930, he published 60 Fotos, a visual treatise in which he performed virtuoso turns on all kinds of photographic possibilities, from camera-less pictures and photograms — for which he squirted oil into developer and squeezed oil between sheets of glass during exposure (among other techniques) — to photomontage, as well as more conventional photographs.
60 Fotos proposed photography as both a medium with intrinsic material properties to explore and as an instrument capable of surpassing the human eye in recording of the world. This classic treatise features some of Moholy-Nagi’s finest examples of photograms, negative prints and photomontage.
When Moholy-Nagy was behind the camera, it was almost as if he took it upon himself to intentionally dismantle everything a camera typically does, trying to better understand the artificiality of its flattened vision. Nearly all of his photographs are exercises in upending perspective and restructuring space, rejecting the idea of a fixed viewpoint. He gets distortingly close to faces. He creates negative prints to invert the black and white tonalities. He repeatedly looks down from a steep bird’s eye view, turning objects far below into crisp geometries. He then reverses course and looks halting upward, exploring an entirely different set of exaggerated angles and planes. Like an engineer, he continually wants to take things apart and then reassemble them to explore the boundaries of how they function.
Condition:
Small chips at spine ends, vertical crease in center of wrappers' slightly faded front cover, light fading and soil; all internal images are very good.