Aug 29

Aug 29 Off-Kilter

Chicago, Architecture, Chicago Tourism, Urban Landscapes

Last night I watched The New Bauhaus Chicago, a documentary exploring László Moholy-Nagy’s life and contributions to the arts and design. By the time Pop Art (Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, and Rosenquist, to name a few) displaced the Abstract Expressionists in the early Sixties, Moholy-Nagy had been dead for 15 years (1946 at the age of 51). While the Pop Artists used art to comment on commerce and consumerism, Moholy-Nagy saw art and commerce as two interconnected and complementary fields. He was a polymath: painter, photographer, sculptor, designer, and teacher who joined the Bauhaus faculty in 1928., which at the time included Paul Klee, Joseph Albers, Herbert Bayer, and Wassily Kandinsky.

In 1932, Mohly-Nagy fled Nazi-Germany, first finding his way to Britain, and then in 1937, heading to Chicago to found the New Bauhaus, which morphed into the School of Design. His patron and sponsor was Walter Paepcke, the then chairman of the Container Corporation of America (a producer of corrugated boxes). It was in Chicago that Moholy-Nagy incorporated his ideas about art and design into a curriculum that produced some of America’s greatest photographers (Ray Metzker, Richard Nicke, Art Sinsabaugh), designers (Henry Glass, Charles Harssison, Art Paul, William Henry Kesslerand), and artists (Ron Gussow, Merry Renk, Tony Smith). Students learned design by first learning how to assemble and use jigsaws, drill presses, lathes, table saws, and other industrial tools. They then created objects that were experimental, artistic and commercial, which explains why a corrugated box manufacture took interest in the school. Mohly-Nagy also incorporated photography into the curriculum, which is not surprising given Moholy-Nagy’s proclamation that “the illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as the pen.”

Moholy-Nagy advocated experimentation, while viewing machines as the intermediary between humans and expression, although his wife says that Moholy-Nagy’s charm was his messy nature.

With all of that in my head, I knew my photographic activities today had to be a little off-kilter, particularly after seeing how he created his photograms. I mixed the conventional with the more experimental. I took the water-taxi to Chinatown, which allowed me to take the most conventional tourist photographs on the cheap. Ten dollars for an all-day pass rather than $48.12 for the 90-minute architectural boat cruise, which doesn’t even go all the way to Chinatown. At one time, the boat cruise included a cookie, but I am not sure it is worth the added cost, assuming they haven’t eliminated the cookie.

Rather than a using fully functioning digital camera, I opted for an old one that had been adapted for infrared photography. Hence the white foliage and high contrast in the skies. To get there, I desaturated the blues that the filters otherwise produce and adjusted the white balance to eliminate the magenta caste.

Here are the results:

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