Moholy-Nagy: The Photograms

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) was one of the most influential artists and teachers at the Bauhaus. Through his works and writings, he contributed to photography's development since the twenties to increasingly become an integral part of the visual arts. The photogram is a part of photography only in terms of its technology, since it employs the light sensitivity of silver salts. Moholy-Nagy was the first artist to explicitly view the photogram as a form of painting in which pigment is replaced by light. He also realized that the photogram follows other optical laws than photography, which merely reproduces the visual world, and conceived of the photogram as a possibility for signalling a "new spatial order".