László Moholy-Nagy

a World Press Features, Ltd., stamp and annotations in pencil and crayon on the reverse, framed, the Buhl Collection label on the reverse, 1920s, printed in the 1940s

Steven Kasher Gallery, New York, 1996

Leland D. Rice and David W. Steadman, Photographs of Moholy-Nagy from the Collections of William Larson (Claremont College, 1975), cover and p. 56

Jeannine Fiedler, ed., Photography at the Bauhaus (MIT Press, 1990), p. 139

Maria Morris Hambourg and Christoper Phillips, The New Vision: Photography Between the World Wars (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), pl. 51

Christopher Phillips, ed., Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913-1940 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), dust jacket

Jeannine Fiedler, László Moholy-Nagy 55 (Phaidon, 2001), p. 2

Gretchen Garner, Disappearing Witness: Change in Twentieth-Century American Photography (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 34

The photograph is on heavy single-weight paper which has a very faint, and pleasing, surface sheen. The print has a rich, slightly warm-green tonality. It has been trimmed to the image, and has no margins. There is some minor wear on the edges of the print, with some occasional chips in the emulsion. There is a crease in the upper left corner which has resulted in a small loss of emulsion. On the reverse, there is the photo agency stamp as well as penciled arrow notations in the four corners. Notations in red pencil or crayon in the center of the reverse have been partially erased. When examined under a blacklight, this print does not appear to fluoresce.
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The photograph offered here combines the motif of the hand with a gesture universal to the act of being photographed: Moholy’s hand playfully pushes away the camera and tries to block the lens.  It is a visual archetype that reverberates throughout the history of 20^th-century photography, both professional and amateur, and into the digital age.

According to Moholy-Nagy authorities Renate Heyne and Hattula Moholy-Nagy, the photographer's daughter, this photograph was made with Moholy's 6-by-9cm-format Ernemann-Kamera, a camera he used almost exclusively in the 1920s and well into the 1930s.  Although this image is sometimes credited in the Moholy literature to Lucia Moholy, the photographer's wife, it is the opinion of Heyne and Hattula Moholy-Nagy that it should be considered a self-portrait instead.  Heyne points out that two other photographs made during the same sitting in strong sunlight, in which Moholy wears the identical jumpsuit, were clearly staged by Moholy and should be considered self-portraits as well.

Another print of this image, slightly larger and with a slightly wider cropping, is in the Ford Motor Company Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  An uncropped contact print is in the Thomas Walther Collection at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.