In Modernist Aesthetics in Transition: Visual Culture in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, eds. Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Donna West Brett (Bloomsbury, 2024 forthcoming).

The vast artistic oeuvre of modernist and Bauhausler László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) was forged in his desire to render visible the kinetic dimension of space-time by using light and shadow as medium. Drawing loosely on various Einsteinian terminology, Moholy considered the related terms “space-time”, “motion and speed”, or “vision in motion,” as designating “a new dynamic and kinetic existence.” His interest in picturing space-time as a means to comprehend the new dimension, forged a path for modernism as an aesthetics in transition across the still and moving image, from the photographic to the cinematic.

From his early artistic endeavors in painting (with canvas and paint), photography, film and design, Moholy was at the forefront of material and aesthetic experimentation. As most commentators point out, his interest in light as the driving force of a new kind of seeing, along with the components of space and time, was a means to render the fourth dimension. Yet, his use of shadows as formal elements, as affect, as subject, and as a means to depict space-time—or what he referred to as “vision in motion”—has been largely overlooked. His formulation of space-time, figured beyond two and three-dimensions through the incorporation of shadows in opposition to light, is of interest as a means to explore Moholy’s engagement with the fourth dimension, and most pertinently to consider the possibilities of his ambition to image vision in motion.

IMAGE: László Moholy-Nagy, Special Effect for “Things to Come”, 1936, by H. G. Wells, 1936, London Film, gelatin silver print, 40 × 29.2 cm.

In Juan Vicente Aliaga, ed., Ilse Bing (Stockport, Dewi Lewis Publishing and Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid), 2022), 47-55. In English, Spanish and Catalan.

German photographer Ilse Bing (1899-1998) has secured her place as one of the major photographers of the 20th century. Her pioneering images during the inter-war era reveal a modern vision influenced by the impact of both the Bauhaus and Surrealism. Alongside her personal work she produced images in the fields of photojournalism, architectural photography, advertising and fashion, and her work was published in the major magazines of the period and exhibited in France and Germany.

She moved from Frankfurt to Paris in 1931 but when the city was taken by the Germans during World War II she and her husband, who were both Jews, were expelled and interned in the South of France. They emigrated to New York in 1941 and she lived there until her death in 1998.

Since the 1970s when she first exhibited at MOMA, New York, there has been a burgeoning interest in her work and, more generally, in European photography of the 1920s and 1930s. As one of the key creative forces of the period Bing became a frequent speaker on the photography of that time and on the development of modern art.

This book, published in association with Fundación MAPFRE, coincides with a comprehensive retrospective of her work being shown in Madrid by MAPFRE from September 2022 to January 2023. The book offers a chronological and thematic survey of Bing's intense creative career and includes over 160 photographs as well as texts by leading experts Juan Vicente Aliaga, Benjamin Buchloh and Donna West Brett. 160 photographs, 296 pages.

Spanish/Catalan language edition: Donna West Brett, Ilse Bing. El surrealisme i el París oníric , in Juan Vicente Aliaga, ed. Ilse Bing, Madrid: Fundación MAPFRE, 2022.

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in Material Modernity: Innovative Visual Work in the Weimar Republic, eds. Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Maria Makela (New York: Bloomsbury, 2022), 143-164.

In the introduction to Malerie, Fotografie, Film from 1925, László Moholy-Nagy sets out his treatise for the optical creation of photography and the depiction of nature using light as a creative agent, what he referred to as “chiaroscuro in place of pigment.” In comparing the differences between photography and painting, he proffered that the quality of a work need not depend on either modern or old theories of composition, but rather the degree of inventive intensity. “It seems to me”, as Moholy-Nagy puts it, “that we, creators of our own time, should go to work with up-to-date means.” Moholy-Nagy’s embrace of the new was less to do with discarding the past as establishing the means or processes appropriate to the work in the time it was made. The task of representation then, according to Moholy-Nagy, fell to photography and film rather than to painting, leaving painting free to advance its non-objective and abstract qualities. This essay analyses the tension in Moholy-Nagy’s statement in terms of his own experiments in the mediums of photography and film. His interest in the absolute representational and optical creation of the Light-Space-Modulator frames an evaluation of his work, not in terms of the mediums of painting, photography or film, but rather in relation to of his experiments in totality through space, light and time.

IMAGE: László Moholy-Nagy, [Plexiglas Mobile Sculpture in Repose and in Motion], 1943, George Eastman Museum

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In Law’s Documents: Materiality, Authority, Aesthetics, eds. Katherine Biber and Trish Luker (Routledge, 2022), 223-245.

Photographs in the Stasi archive of the former East German Security Service record the mass surveillance activities of the regime, and document traces of attempted or successful escapes from the German Democratic Republic as part of an evidentiary process. These meticulous records include precise accounts of surveillance activities, which take the form of documents, audio recordings, moving footage, and approximately two million photographs. The function of these photographic records as evidence is often undone by poor photographic practices, blurry or damaged images, which are further complicated by the attempted destruction of the records in 1989 at the end of the regime. Furthermore, material supplied to researchers is redacted and pixilated, and in so doing, meaning is obscured, and the remedial possibilities of public dissemination are impeded. This essay considers the material properties of photographs in the Stasi archive that have been subject to material violence reducing them to what can be thought of as inadequate images.

IMAGE: BStU Berlin

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In Routledge Handbook on Street Culture, ed. Jeffrey Ross (New York: Routledge, 2021), 295-309.

From the beginning of the medium, photographers have been drawn to the urban environment as subject, in many ways reflecting the rising interest in the modern metropolis in art and literature. The urban flâneur of Parisian streets, for example, was a stroller or wanderer epitomised by French literature in the nineteenth century. As a modern figure, both Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin described the flâneur as an observer of urban life, both intrinsic to and alienated from the rapidly changing metropolis. It is perhaps no surprise that one of the earliest photographs produced was of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris by one of the founding figures of the medium, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in 1838. This chapter takes Daguerre’s photograph of Boulevard du Temple as the basis from which to explore the history of street photography by considering key tendencies in the genre – that of the candid photograph of unwitting everyday subjects (Westerbeck & Meyerowitz, 1994), documentary photography of the street (Scott, 2007), and renditions of the empty street that harken to the earliest years of the medium and are still prevalent in recent practise (Jacobs, 2006; Hawker, 2013).

IMAGE: Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, Boulevard du Temple by Daguerre, 1838. Private Collection. Photo © GraphicaArtis / Bridgeman Images.

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In Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images, eds. Donna West Brett and Natalya Lusty (Routledge, 2019), 24–40.

From 1961 to 1989 the border between East and West Berlin became a focus for extreme surveillance activities by the GDR border guards, the Stasi and the Allied forces with hundreds of thousands of photographs taken every year. The border authorities and the Stasi recorded each escape attempt from East Germany in extensive surveillance notes, interviews, sketches and photographs, which were used as evidence then archived. Among these records are photographic traces of everyday lives concealing seditious plans of flight and those of the aftermath of an escape including tunnels, air balloons, wetsuits or cars. In addition are disturbing photographs of unsuccessful attempts, where subjects are forced to re-enact their escape attempts before the camera. This essay examines a selection of photographs drawn from the Stasi archive, some of which have been re-presented by German contemporary photographer Arwed Messmer. It will consider these photographs both in terms of their use as evidence and as emotive records of oppression, fear and treachery.

IMAGE: Untitled [Observers of a possible escape incident in Berlin, 26th of August 1962]. Stasi Records Agency, Berlin, BStU MfS HA I 13255, Bild 0123 10

Artmatter 02, Agency & Aesthetics (Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki and Massey University, 2018), 28-37.

In The Wretched of the Screen, Hito Steyerl interrogates what she calls the poor or latent image; the debris of audiovisual production, the jpeg washed up on the shores of a digital economy that testifies to the violent dislocation and displacement of images. Poor images can also be latent images, they are illegible like a worn or damaged negative; the subject long faded into obscurity and withdrawn from representation. The more we are seen, photographed or observed, we increasingly disappear in both the real and cyber worlds because as Steyerl puts it, “photographic or moving images are dangerous devices of capture: of time, affect, productive forces, and subjectivity.” She investigates the concept of the disappearing subject and the latent image in her video-works including How not to be seen: A fucking didactic educational. Mov file from 2013. The video, based on a skit by the Monty Python gang of their version of How not to be seen—which itself draws on educational films for camouflage tactics—reflects on Ernst Bloch’s ruminations on Ways Not to be Seen. In her work, Steyerl presents a disruptive tension between the pervading sense of constantly being under surveillance and the desire not to be seen or to be invisible. This paper considers the concept of the aesthetics of disruption and the conditions that cause a subject or an image to withdraw, to hide or to disappear in the work of Australian artist Cherine Fahd, and Paris based Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige.

IMAGE: Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Postcards of War from the series Wonder Beirut, 1997–2006. Courtesy of the artists.

In Burcu Dogramaci and Elizabeth Otto, eds. Passagen des Exils (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik 35, 2017), 268-285.

This chapter considers the passage of exile taken by East German citizens escaping to the West. The psychological, emotional and physical perceptions of anticipation that surround and pre-empt the event of escape are analysed in terms of different ways of looking and recording such events of passage, and how feeling or emotion is conveyed through, or caused by, the photographic act. The photographers are largely unknown, and include images taken by photojournalists, escape helpers (fluchthelfers), border guards of the German Democratic Republic or by the Stasi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS). These emotive records of both elation and loss also record the moment of stasis between home and homelessness, between belonging and not belonging.

IMAGE: Arwed Messmer, using a print, call number BStU MfS HA IX Fo 2180 Bl. 0004.

In Kris Belden-Adams, ed. Photography and Failure: One Medium's Entanglement with Flops, Underdogs and Disappointments (Bloomsbury, 2017), 45-60.

This chapter will consider Ilse Bing’s New York photographs of the urban fabric and her self-portraiture in terms of her sense of alienation, a condition that for Kracauer is an essentialising state of being for creative production and a central force for photography itself. It will also speculate on the ways in which the medium of photography failed Bing in terms of its capacity to capture her ongoing artistic ambitions and as a means by which to forge a career in America. In his essay ‘Farewell to the Linden Arcade’, Kracauer (whom I speculate is a lasting influence on Bing) ruminates on the urban landscape and in particular the arcade, as reflecting the conditions of homelessness and absence; always in a marginal state of transition and displacement (Kracauer 1995b: 337–42). The concept of the homeless image recurs throughout his writing where photographic meaning is transformed by the loss of the referent and suggests the state of exile, echoing his own condition of being ‘extraterritorial’ (Jay 1975 and Richter 2007: 107–18). I turn to Kracauer’s speculations on photography, and his reflections on the homeless image as a way of illuminating the paradoxical nature of photographing place from the position of the exile, to explore the condition of homelessness and the forgetting of Ilse Bing.

IMAGE: Ilse Bing, Self-Portrait with Leica, 1931, gelatin silver print, printed c. 1988, 26.7 x 29.7 cm, Gift of Ilse Bing Wolff, 2001.147.9. Art Institute of Chicago. ©Estate of Ilse Bing.

In Ann Shelton: Dark Matter, (Auckland Art Gallery, Toi o Tāmaki, NZ, 2016), 58–63.

Shelton’s photographic process has consistently engaged with uneasy places, sites of fractured and anxious histories, and with events that have been displaced in the landscape. Drawing on her earlier career as a newspaper photographer, Shelton approaches her subjects much like a private investigator or a domestic archaeologist, gathering material that forms a skin and a framework for the eventuating photographic series.

IMAGE: Ann Shelton

In Ann Elias, Ross Harley and Nicholas Tsoutas (Eds), Camouflage Cultures: The Art of Disappearance (University of Sydney Press, 2015), 147-157.

Photography in Cold War Germany was used as a strategic and political device to analyse activity along both sides of the Berlin Wall, to record attempted escapes and citizens’ daily actions in a way that would define and limit what could or could not be seen in East Germany from 1961 to 1989. The Berlin Wall is discussed here specifically in terms of its enabling effect of the extensive surveillance control methods of the GDR government and its secret service agency, and its role as a unique camouflage device. The erection of the Berlin Wall and the ways in which the government controlled the public eye had significant effects on the field of vision and led to a range of Wall-induced pathologies with several sociologists considering the erection of the Wall, and its resultant limits on seeing, as violating expectations of normality.

IMAGE: BArch, DVH 60 Bild-GR35-10-016 /ohne Angabe. Courtesy Arwed Messmer and the German Federal Archives