Staircase modernism: Moholy-Nagy's English photobooks
Kelley, Victoria (2025) Staircase modernism: Moholy-Nagy's English photobooks. Photography and Culture. ISSN 1751-4517 (print); 1751-4525 (online) (In Press)
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Lázsló Moholy-Nagy’s work as an avant-garde photographer, painter, sculptor, film-maker and theorist has been examined extensively in books and exhibitions. However, one aspect of his output is relatively under-researched — three photobooks made in Britain in the 1930s, on the subject of Eton (private school), Oxford (town and university) and the informal street markets in London. Even when the first two of these books have been analysed, The Street Markets of London (1936) has continued to be neglected. This paper re-examines Moholy- Nagy’s three English photobooks and investigates the marginalisation of the street markets volume. It argues that, far from being ‘merely documentary’ in nature and antithetical to Moholy-Nagy’s earlier experimental photography, all three books, but especially that on street markets, show continuity with many of Moholy-Nagy’s earlier concerns and innovations, employing these in the context of a socially-engaged documentary mode which applied the artist’s ‘new vision’ as a tool for observing and analysing the modern city of the 1930s, an approach designated staircase modernism. Moholy-Nagy’s photographs depicted the street markets more effectively than previous representations, providing a visual dissection of both the spatial configuration of the markets and the character of the people and things that were gathered in them.
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