I
have looked at the work of László Moholy-Nagy he was born in Hungary,
and began to study law before joining the Austro-Hungarian army at the
outbreak of World War 1. Although he had already begun to draw, it was
during the war that he turned to it in a serious manner producing hundreds of sketches in 1917 he was wounded and had a long convalescence he then began thinking seriously about becoming an artist. He
worked with many different techniques and media, such as painting,
photography, sculpture, film and graphics and explored the relationships
between light and colour In his abstract paintings, gaining his
inspiration from the Russian avant-garde: Constructivism, the
Suprematists Malevich and Lissitzky. Moholy-Nagy became interested in
photography after meeting Lucia Schultz, a talented photographer who he later married.
He
was interested in painting with light, and the techniques used to
create an image. He was one of the first artists to experiment with
photograms, these were images made without using a camera. He placed
every day objects between a sheet of light-sensitive paper and a light
source to create abstract shadow images. He also worked with
photomontage, cutting images out of newspapers and magazines to create
a new picture. He would draw and paint these montages, and then
photograph them joining the components into an image that could be
reproduced from a negative. He called these photomontages
“photoplastics”* to emphasise that it is the light that shaped the
image.
Moholy-Nagy
used a portable miniature camera to explore how photography through
its ability to record forms can change and renew our perception of the
everyday. Lines, patterns and shapes dominate his black-and-white
photographs of the world and make us perceive reality afresh. He liked
to use unusual camera angles – often taking the pictures from a bird’s
or a worm’s eye view – as well as shadows and negative photos – in which
the photographic negative is itself presented as the photograph.He made
a number of documentary films between 1930 and 1946 giving life and
movement to his photography.he died i 1946 at the age of 51
Here is some of the work by Moholy-Nagy that I enjoyed viewing
I have spent the past couple of weeks looking for lines and curves as part of my assignment, so was fascinated to see the amount of detail in this image with all the lines, curves and added atmosphere created by the use of light
