László Moholy-Nagy’s Photoplastics and Homogeneous Photomontage

Abstract

I trace the emergence and evolution of László Moholy-Nagy’s photoplastics and their connection to the artist’s movies and movie scripts. By closely reading Moholy-Nagy’s statements concerning the nature of his photopastics, I show that their homogeneity and their clarity of meaning is derived from his similar experiments with film montage. Moholy-Nagy’s experiments from his film script Dynamic of the Metropolis (1925) exhibit similar characteristics to Eisenstein’s intellectual montage. In the evolution of avant-garde photomontage during the second decade of the past century, Moholy-Nagy’s photoplastics are an important achievement in the transformation of heterogeneous photomontage, which consisted of abrupt juxtaposition of the most disparate elements ‒ a technique closely related to visual collage ‒, into homogeneous photomontage which is defined by the articulation of clear meaning.