Matters of the Art
Montoya Blog ~ Matters of the Art
The Photographic Impact of the “New Vision” of the Bauhaus
Student-Armed Documentation of the Bauhaus
“The illiterate of the future will be ignorant of camera and pen alike” - Moholy-Nagy
Umbo (Otto Umbehr), The Roving Reporter, photomontage (rephotographed), 1926
Look at the photograph above; The Hypersonic Reporter by Umbo. What comes to mind? One of the transformers? The Terminator? The Star Trek Borg? Would it surprise you to know this is a cyborg man, an artist, equipped to handle the problems of the modern world envisioned nearly a century ago at the Bauhaus. It looks like it was made yesterday. The Hypersonic Reporter acts as the poster child to the type of photographic experimentation undertaken at the Bauhaus, and will allow for an exploration of the working methods Bauhaus photographers developed that led to a revolution in 20th century photography.
Consider the Moholy-Nagy quote, “The illiterate of the future will be ignorant of camera and pen alike.” He is also saying -in a reverse statement- that if you are literate in camera and pen you should be able to decipher the Hypersonic Reporter by the given clues in the photograph. You will thus be able to “read” the photograph. This image is a collage; what Moholy-Nagy considered an engineered product, where the photographer manipulates cuttings from many photographs to create a photograph -with a message. And what is the message? Let’s break down the imagery of Umbo’s Hypersonic Journalist. We see that the reporter is a giant, striding energetically into a commercial Babylon, armed with the new tools of the reporter; so important they are literally part of his cyborg body. He has an automobile for a right foot and a bi-plane for a left foot. Only his face and his classically-rendered hand are the remaining human parts of his machine-augmented body. Notably, we see how the portable camera has become mounted to his eye, and a Victrola speaker enlarged and mounted to his ear. He is equipped to go anywhere in the world, from mountain to city. This is a human cyborg; the perfect journalist of modernity who has the tools needed to instantly document the daily existence in the mechanical age of the 20th century.
What manner of teaching at the Bauhaus could have given us this prophetic robot of the future? Bauhaus photography was largely under the direction of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the first unofficial photography teacher (he was actually head of the metalworking school) who sought to create a “New Vison”, a way of producing photography using the innovative elements of perception, and of visual language, then adapting these to photography. The new techniques being added to photography were in ways of new perspectives of taking pictures. These elements were the collage, the close-up, the enlargement, the varying perspective (the worm’s-eye view and the birds’-eye view), the montage and a re-introduced arrival of the mirror from traditional painting. But most importantly an integration with the human body -traditionally a stationery object that was a byproduct of early photography when the camera was more cumbersome. It was these elements that were being experimented with and came to be called the “New Vision” in Bauhaus photography. This new way of seeing liberated the portrait from its stiff, formal theatre-like poses of the 19th century and brought to the art of the portrait the modern world of kinetic movement. The effect of the “New Vision” of perception is highlighted in the genre of self-portrait photography. Emerging techniques in collage and photomontages were used as tools to decipher the new view of time and space. This frees the photographer from the role of the copyist, (banal reproducer of the image), and allows for the creativity of artists making their own stand-alone art form.
Within the Bauhaus curriculum existed a high regard for the human body, exhibited via exercise and movement. This interest translated into greater opportunities to capture photographs of the body in motion because of the proximity of the athletics on campus. For the first time, students armed with the Leica camera, small and portable, were able to take photography out of the hands of the specialist and use it to document everyday life of the Bauhaus.
Additionally, the intimacy of the close up and the enlargement of the portraits are creating a new dimension of subjective feeling and emotion imbued in the photograph. The body movement heightens the “decisive moment” of the image, giving it a freshness not seen before. Advances in experiments with collage and montage also created new awareness that the photo could have multiple readings. The addition of the mirror and the theme of reflection, hinting at the narcissism, popular in painting, were imported into the photographic usage.
The classes taught by Chzecklovacian Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, the :constructivist,” encouraged the Bauhaus to consider these photographic problems that led in the development of the “New Vison”. In his teachings, Nagy was deeply concerned with the new problems of space relations presented by the modern machine-produced world. Artists also began to use the mirror to create a multitude of reflections or refractions in the portrait that departs from the traditional staging of the portrait. These views capture a modern view made possible by portable technology and also create a unique position that the photographer might also be the model. This revolution is made by the students who are also the subject of their own documentation at the Bauhaus. One only needs to view college pictures of the Bauhaus to get a feeling for the energy and testimony of the power of the experiments.
What further propels the Bauhaus into orbit of design of our day is that is the arrival in 1929 of Walter Peterhans to the Bauhaus. It is Perehans who brings an of opposite attitude to photography (as the first official photography instructor). For Peterhans, there was the rejection of experiments of Moholy-Nagy and the return to technical craft of photography to create specific designs with the introduction of the “New Objectivity”. This was a sober effect on the program with the introduction of objectivity, but it was also a grounding to the legitimacy of the program that helped to make it last to this day. So in one school there was both sides of the coin when it came to taking photographs. One, where Moholy-Nagy encouraged the artistic exploration of perception in the mind of the artist, not so much on the technical details of the photograph. And the other which was the aesthetics of the “New Objectivity” which was to remove the subjective artistic frivolity and replace it with an objective adherence to craft that would make a meaningful use of the technique in the context of commercial application. These two different views create a “tension” which creates good art. The work at the Bauhaus has become the cornerstone of modern advertising. I believe this is the key to understanding how strong the influence is today.
On viewing books on the Bauhaus, we are struck by how many pictures of college life are shown. The reader quickly becomes intimate with the life at the Bauhaus. The documentation of life at the Bauhaus is really the living resource for the industrial artist of today. Student pictures of college life have become the “truth” of the camera eye, that truth is that the Bauhaus was an amazing entity, a place with a joy of life in the art academy. Students empowered with a camera have created a testament to the gathered body of amazing instructors and great body of work that lives on in academia today in our own industrial arts colleges. Many of the same teaching methods are still being taught. The “New Vision” of Moholy-Nagy has allowed the school itself acting as the foil the stage-set for the new way of photography. In seeing the portraits below, Eckstein with Lipstick, 1930 and Umbo, Self-portrait, 1930, it is hard to tell these are nearly one hundred year old photographs it is as if these images could be directly removed from this month’s issue of Vanity Fair or Vogue magazine.
It is because we are accustomed to seeing with this modern eye that the Bauhaus proposed that it takes re-discovery. We are literally immersed in the “New Vision” of the Bauhaus in our everyday lives that we may not be able to discern otherwise. It is now the current operating system we live by. The Bauhaus is a past mirror reflection, we are many copies removed from the original, but the product of the Bauhaus is very much with us. 