Camera Constructs

Photography, Architecture and the Modern City

Andrew Higgott, Timothy Wray, Andrew Higgott, Timothy Wray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409421450
• eBook ISBN: 9781351953504
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Photography and architecture have a uniquely powerful resonance - architectural form provides the camera with the subject for some of its most compelling imagery, while photography profoundly influences how architecture is represented, imagined and produced. Camera Constructs is the first book to reflect critically on the varied interactions of the different practices by which photographers, artists, architects, theorists and historians engage with the relationship of the camera to architecture, the city and the evolution of Modernism. The title thus on the one hand opposes the medium of photography and the materiality of construction - but on the other can be read as saying that the camera invariably constructs what it depicts: the photograph is not a simple representation of an external reality, but constructs its own meanings and reconstructs its subjects. Twenty-three essays by a wide range of historians and theorists are grouped under the themes of 'Modernism and the Published Photograph', 'Architecture and the City Re-imagined', 'Interpretative Constructs' and 'Photography in Design Practices.' They are preceded by an Introduction that comprehensively outlines the subject and elaborates on the diverse historical and theoretical contexts of the authors' approaches. Camera Constructs provides a rich and highly original analysis of the relationship of photography to built form from the early modern period to the present day.

Section IV
Photography in Design Practices

18
Material Immateriality: Moholy-Nagy’s Search for Space

Ivana Wingham

Space creation is not primarily a question of the building material.¹

László Moholy-Nagy

Introduction: Space and Place

With the introduction of the camera, László Moholy-Nagy saw that the potential for producing visual images had been expanded: 'the modern lens is no longer tied to the narrow limits of our eye; no manual means of representation (pencil, brush, etc.) is capable of arresting fragments of the world seen like this; it is equally impossible for manual means of creation to fix the quintessence of movement'.² For Moholy-Nagy, arresting light as a tool –'chiaroscuro in place of a pigment'³ – extended the limits of drawn or painted marks.

My interest in excavating such 'old' material as the early photographic work of László Moholy-Nagy is not to describe its relevance in terms of its particular technique, as of course each epoch has its own, equally exciting, new techniques. Nor is it my aim to examine the exotic and nostalgic nature of such images, even though they may be extremely seductive to an architect's eye. My desire is to look at the making of such an image in order to understand what it may mean for the future of image production, and, in particular, its power of transformation in search for something else. According to Susan Sontag the photographer always 'discloses' something, and 'photographic seeing ... has to be constantly renewed with new shocks, whether of subject matter or technique, so as to produce the impression of violating ordinary vision'.⁴ Furthermore, I believe that the power of transformation embodied in a photographic image has technical and conceptual implications to the creative processes of art or design making. Here I wish to discuss one particular aspect of such processes – a power of photographic practice to search for space.

It is enough to look at Andreas Gursky's photographs of stacks of food crates in supermarkets, workers behind the facades of well-lit office buildings and profit-making market traders to realize the incessant conquering desire for the consumption of space. The French philosopher Bruno Latour has stated that the recent focus on philosophical discussions concerning 'spheres and networks' is motivated by one ultimate goal – a search for space, 'a vastly more comfortably inhabitable space'.⁵ The cultural geographer Edward Soja also discusses the 'spatial turn' as a growing area in interdisciplinary studies. In Soja's opinion the focus on space becomes 'a fertile area for critical spatial innovative experimentation in the areas of visual, performance and film studies'.⁶

Latour links a philosophical search for space to the reality and materiality of the local, opposed to what the 'Moderns' sought to do – to live in a location-free universe. For Latour 'the Moderns have no place, no topos, no locus to sit and stay', and he further criticizes the possibility that the 'real world could be confused with the expanse of the white sheet of paper'.⁷ The most damning critique that Latour proposes of the 'Moderns' is that their history is the history of the printing press, art history, the history of projective geometry, and definitely not a 'natural' history. In the context of such arguments would it be possible to address photographic practice as a means of image production that starts from the reality of the material world, or even a natural history, and through its different stages instigates a transformation that opens a way to space?

The Search for an Intellectualized Mode of Production

László Moholy-Nagy, the Bauhaus teacher, artist and photographer, described ordering by telephone in 1922 five pictures made of porcelain enamel from a sign company. He had the company's colour charts in front of him while sketching pictures on graph paper and talking to its director, who had the same squared paper in front of him which he used to transpose Moholy-Nagy's instructions. Although there is some doubt as to the veracity of the event itself,⁸ using a telephone to order pictures represented a visionary experiment. Obtaining pictures at a distance through a medium of communication, the so-called Telephone Pictures were undeniably a novel way of producing art. The reality of ordering a work of art using a colour chart is similar to the architect's world of specifying a colour scheme, for example for bathroom tiles in a building. The process is often the same – sampling, ordering and specifying, while somebody else executes the work.

Krisztina Passuth suggests that the idea of the artist not directly effecting the creation of his own work was originally advanced by the Dadaists, and that, in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades, in Moholy-Nagy's case the intellectual basis of the Telephone Pictures 'principally related to the theory of Soviet Constructivism'.⁹ Passuth further suggests that Moholy-Nagy's 'interest in the telephone pictures was principally academic', although 'theoretically ... [they] are able to be reproduced and manufactured in a series', which is what Moholy-Nagy was 'probably thinking when he ordered them, one of each, from the factory'.¹⁰ However since only a few were made they remained an experiment, but one that brought to the fore a different way of producing an art object.

The difference in the process of production is significant in understanding a photographic image, as through the way in which it is produced the artist can clearly display a critical position. Moholy-Nagy, as a modern artist, was interested in machine-based processes of production and, as Rainer K. Wick writes, the Telephone Pictures were pioneering in suggesting that 'art in the industrial age could consist of an anonymous machine process of high precision and exist independently of the personal intervention of the artist's hand'.¹¹ The experiment demonstrated that 'the act of artistic creation should be seen in the intellectual aspect and not in the manual one'.¹²

The Telephone Pictures displayed a significant shift in outlining the separation between an intellectual idea and its execution. According to Wick, the experiment is emblematic of Moholy-Nagy's work in general, in its separation of what might be called 'conceptual work' from 'material execution'.¹³ He drew his conclusions from Andreas Haus, who, in his analysis of Moholy-Nagy's photographic oeuvre, explicitly alluded to this separation: 'He [Moholy-Nagy] sought to eliminate completely all-material work ... and transposed the process of "design" into the intellectual disposition of "preparation". In doing so he was performing as an artist the equivalent of the separation of manual and intellectual labour found in modern technological production.'¹⁴ In addition, Haus suggested that 'whereas until then the artist was still bearer of an ideology of "identical" 'and thus un-alienated work, Moholy-Nagy enthusiastically turned over to mechanical means the process of actually shaping the material and instead merely designed its "application"'.¹⁵

Eliminating materiality and replacing it by a process of 'preparation' (albeit that the process involved an intellectually designed 'application') meant that Moholy-Nagy's work not only demonstrated an 'escape' from the material, but also redefined artistic and design practice. Throughout his creative experimentation he sought ways to dematerialize an object in order to find new spatial relationships. This was present in various areas of his work. For example, in discussing volume in the context of sculptural works such as the Light-Space Modulator (1922—1930), Moholy-Nagy claimed that the so-called 'fifth-kinetic stage'¹⁶ of sculptural development from the standpoint of the treatment of material was one in which 'the volume relationships are virtual ones, i.e., resulting mainly from the actual movement of the contours, rings, rods, and other objects'.¹⁷ He further suggested that

a similar quest for expression by subduing or lightening the material is to be found ... in sculpture: from mass to motion; in painting: from coloured pigment to light (display of coloured light); in music: from instrumental tones to electronic purity (ether wave music); in poetry: from syntax and grammar relations to single words; in architecture: from restricted closed spaces to free fluctuation of forces.¹⁸

The strategy of breaking up a volume into elements and 'lightening' the material by searching for relationships was a search for invisible, unseen, as yet unfound space. For Moholy-Nagy, 'the real spatial experience rests on simultaneous interpenetration of inside and outside, above and beneath, on the communication of in and out, on the often invisible play of forces present in the materials and their relationships in space'.¹⁹ Furthermore 'material is energy' and, for him, this 'will have significance for architecture by emphasizing relation, instead of mass'.²⁰ Seeing material as energy propelled Moholy-Nagy towards experimentation not only with new mediums but also new technologies, and in particular the camera.

The Photogram: An Escape from Material into the Realm of the Intellectual

In his photograms, photographs and films Moholy-Nagy's main material was one of the most immaterial of all media: light. For him, the camera was 'based on new optical laws' which allowed for '"light composition", whereby light would be controlled as a new plastic medium, just as colour in painting and tone in music'.²¹ His interest in capturing light as a medium of expression was related to his strategy of dematerializing the material in search for new space. Moholy-Nagy stated that photograms are 'obtained by fixing light effects in black-white-grey gradations directly on the photosensitive layer' which 'obtain a sublimated, radiant, almost dematerialized effect'.²²

Dematerializing objects and searching for spatial relationships were already evident early in Moholy-Nagy's career. Sometime between 1917 and 1919, when he was exploring the way that other artists used lines, Moholy-Nagy made a drawing without objects but composed only of lines, either straight or curved, that sought to express space through relationships. The drawing was called Build! Build! and attempted to see lines as 'diagrams of inner forces'.²³ The dematerializing strategies he employed were various. In painting, they were achieved through such 'auxiliary lines'. In photograms, dematerialization occurred through captured light, which created elements that floated on a black background. In photographs, unusual views discovered new spatial effects. In the case of film, juxtapositions of light and shadow in motion instigated an effect of dematerialization and a new understanding of space. Each of these dematerialization strategies demanded from the viewer a conceptual engagement in spatial relationships and for him/her to make his/her own connections through a subjective thought-process. The immaterial nature of the line as a mark in the dematerialization strategies of Moholy-...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Architectural and Photographic Constructs
• SECTION I MODERNISM AND THE PUBLISHED PHOTOGRAPH
• SECTION II ARCHITECTURE AND THE CITY RE-IMAGINED
• SECTION III INTERPRETATIVE CONSTRUCTS
• SECTION IV PHOTOGRAPHY IN DESIGN PRACTICES
• Index
• Colour Plates