Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
[Artist, photographer, designer, and teacher, b. 1895, Bacsbarsod, Hungary, d. 1946, Chicago, Illinois.]
The photogram, or camera-less record of forms produced by light, which embodies the unique nature of the photographic process, is the real key to photography.
... no intention exists of making photography into an art in the old sense. We definitely have to go back to the deeper responsibility of the photographer who accomplishes a work with the photographic means which could not be accomplished the in the same way with other means. Therefore the existence of photography today exists less in serving individual artistic expression but rather much more in it pedagogical function.
In today’s photographic work, the first and foremost issue is to develop an integrally photographic approach that is derived purely from the means of photography itself.
The photographic process has no precedent among the previously known visual media. And when photography relies on its own possibilities, its results, too, are without precedent.
Men still kill one another, they have not yet understood how they live, why they live; politicians fail to observe that the earth is an entity, yet television has been invented: the “Far Seer”—tomorrow we shall be able to look into the heart of our fellow-man, be everywhere and yet be alone; illustrated books, newspapers, magazines are printed—in millions. The unambiguousness of the real, the truth in the everyday situation is there for all classes. The hygiene of the optical, the health of the visible is slowly filtering through.
Everyone will be compelled to see that which is optically true, is explicable in its own terms, is objective, before he can arrive at any possible subjective position. This will abolish that pictorial and imaginative association pattern which has remained unsuperseded for centuries and which has been stamped upon our vision by great individual painters.
