Typophoto

Unveiling the avant-garde fusion of photography and modern graphic design

The concept “Typophoto,” the synthesis of photography and typography, was coined by renowned Bauhaus artist and theorist László Moholy-Nagy and played a foundational role in the modernist graphic design movement known as the New Typography. Here, Jessica D. Brier examines how Typophoto was embraced by early graphic designers—a group who ultimately reinvented photography as a tool of modern consumerism.

Typophoto embodied designers’ belief in photography as an efficient form of visual communication, merging the material and the visual by abstracting both typographic and photographic form and transmuting photography into graphic material through the halftone process. Uniquely situating 1920s advertising discourse alongside avant-garde theory and significant interwar photographic concepts, Brier positions Typophoto as an analytical framework for considering how photography—as process, image, material, and metaphor—was effectively reconceived through the professionalization of graphic design in Europe and the United States. This was particularly true in Germany, where the capitalist ethos driving the country’s economic recovery bolstered the belief that graphics could create ideal reader-consumers.

Tracing Typophoto from its inception through New Typography’s experiments with the medium, Brier demonstrates how photography was used as a tool for manipulating perception as it became a visual language of modern life.

Jessica D. Brier is curator of photography at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. She is editor of On the Grid: Ways of Seeing in Print and coeditor of Making a Life in Photography: Rollie McKenna.