“This is the century of light,” the Hungarian-born painter and photographer László Moholy-Nagy declared in 1927. “Photography is the first form of the formal design of light.” Film, he added, “goes even farther in this direction.” Most of us don’t think specifically of light when looking at a photograph or watching a movie. We’re caught up in the image. But there are photographers and filmmakers whose sole subject is the play of light itself, and they’ve sometimes done away with the camera completely. With the art of photography approaching its two-century mark, the Getty Center, in Los Angeles, has just opened the exhibition “Abstracted Light: Experimental Photography,” a survey of early- and mid-20th-century artists who made light their subject.
Science is never far from the work of the 26 artists represented in “Abstracted Light.” Many of them revived the photogram, a technique that dates back to photography’s earliest days and sees objects placed directly on light-sensitive paper. After W.W. I, Surrealism was on the rise, and what constituted representation was very much in flux. In the mid-1920s, Moholy-Nagy threw matches and napkin rings across a light-sensitive surface to create the ghostly Fotogramm, while in Paris, the Philadelphia-born Man Ray made photograms of scissors, paper, alphabet stencils, and a gun—all stylized images squarely in the Surrealist tradition of making everyday objects strange.
