Climbing the Mast

Bauhaus Photography. This exciting and unexpected view up the rigging of a sailboat, made on the Spree River near Berlin, is a prime example of Moholy's "new vision." Armed with a small hand-held camera and a free-wheeling spirit, Moholy made "bird's-eye" and "worm's-eye" views that transformed the pictorial conventions of perspective and posited a new way of experiencing and representing the world. His disorienting, topsy-turvy viewpoints viscerally communicated the dynamism of the modern world and paralleled the social revolutions of the Weimar Republic. The legacy of Hungarian artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy is among the most cherished in the lineage of photographic art, and he can be defined as a visionary whose radical experiments with photography entirely re-imagined the possibilities for the medium. Working in the early 20th century when photography was not considered a form of high art, Moholy-Nagy actively sought to break down boundaries and find new languages of photographic discourse. In doing so, he left behind an oeuvre of visual ideas that have provided artistic license to a century’s worth of photographers to experiment boldly beyond the conventional definitions of what photography is expected to be. Edition: 1 of 1