Note from the editor :

Offered a position at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1923, László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) soon belonged to the inner circle of Bauhaus masters. When the school moved to Dessau, Moholy-Nagy and Walter Gropius began a fruitful collaboration as joint publishers of the Bauhausbücher series.

In this book, Moholy-Nagy’s efforts to have photography and filmmaking recognized as art forms on the same level as painting are propounded and explained at length. The artist makes the case for a radical rethinking of the visual arts and the further development of photographic design to keep pace with a radically changing technological modernity.

Alongside theoretical and technical approaches and forays into the nature of the medium, Moholy-Nagy uses an extensive appendix of illustrations to provide a thorough survey of the numerous possibilities that photography and film could offer—from press photography and scientific imagery to Moholy-Nagy’s own abstract photograms and New Vision photographs.