Moholy-Nagy: Gary Sutton would be proud of this one, in 1923 Nagy joined the faculty Bauhaus. The Bauhaus' goal was to integrate the arts with industry. Nagy worked heavily in sculpture and painting before becoming the photographer we know now. His photo-grams and light modulator are what I'm interested in, I find the idea of lights movement as a piece intriguing but I have some ideas of how to apply it a different way...
Raoul Ubac: Painter and photographer who became an active member of the Surrealist movement in Paris in the 1930s. He published in the French Surrealist magazine ‘Minotaur‘. I'm assuming these are solarized prints, Lydia?
Minor White: His pieces stick in to me due to knowledge about him and his belief that:
"Photography as wherein the visual world was rediscovered as a font of spiritual illumination for those willing to look a process."
"Stieglitz's idea of "equivalents" from the master himself was crucial to the direction of White's mature post-war work. The "equivalents" of White were often photographs of barns, doorways, water, the sky, or simple paint peeling on a wall: things usually considered mundane, but often made special by the quality of the light in which they were photographed. One of his more popular photographs is titled Frost on Window, a close-up of frost crystals on glass. However, in regard to an equivalent, the specific objects themselves are of secondary importance either to the photographer or the viewer. Instead, such a photograph captures a sentiment or emotionally symbolic idea using formal and structural elements that carry a feeling or sense of "recognition": a mirroring of something inside the viewer. In an essay titled "Equivalence: The Perennial Trend", White described a photographer who took such pictures as one who "...recognized an object or series of forms that, when photographed, would yield an image with specific suggestive powers that can direct the viewer into a specific and known feeling, state, or place within himself." (Gantz) Because of the way in which he wanted his photographs to be experienced, White was very particular with regard to the both technical aspects of his art and the quality of the images he produced (Lemangy, 192). To transmit his messages—to ‘direct the viewer’—White employs a variety of methods; he creates symbols to represent emotions, he accompanies his images with text or places them in sequence.
What are my equivalents?Are people (i.e. portraiture) my Equivalent?
Gustave Klucsis: Klusis worked in a variety of experimental media. He liked to use propaganda as a sign or revolutionary background image. His first project of note, in 1922, was a series of semi-portable multimedia agitprop kiosks to be installed on the streets of Moscow, integrating "radio-orators", film screens, and newsprint displays, all to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Revolution. Like other Constructivists he worked in sculpture, produced exhibition installations, illustrations and ephemera.But Klucis and Kulagina are primarily known for their photo montages. The names of some of their best posters, like "Electrification of the whole country" (1920), "There can be no revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory" (1927), and "Field shock workers into the fight for the socialist reconstruction" (1932), are as dated and stuffy as the images are fresh, powerful, and sometimes eerie. For economy they often posed for, and inserted themselves into, these images, disguised as shock workers or peasants. Their dynamic compositions, distortions of scale and space, angled viewpoints and colliding perspectives make them perpetually modern. In the later work the presence of Stalin, accepting the applause of a cut-and-paste cross-section of Soviet society, resonates with the falsity of Stalin's myth.
Photogravure? Maybe...
