Typophoto

"A novel interplay between text and image, Typophoto fused—as Jessica D. Brier demonstrates in this insightful account—the interests of advertisers with those of the avant-garde, thus instigating a process that ultimately resulted in the ubiquitous pixelated imagery of our own day."—Kathleen James-Chakraborty, author of Modernism as Memory: Building Identity in the Federal Republic of Germany

"In this deeply researched book, Jessica D. Brier examines the close relationship between photography, typography, and mass printing in the interwar period, revealing the extent to which this both transformed the landscape of printed matter and the modes of seeing that it engendered. Above all, she highlights the ways new print technologies enabled photography to become the central medium of modernist visual culture. Alongside the key theorists László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, and Jan Tschichold, she also brings lesser-known artist–designers like Max Burchartz, Johannes Molzahn, and Georg Trump to the forefront, indicating the range and depth of work produced under the banner of Typophoto."—Paul Stirton, author of Jan Tschichold and the New Typography: Graphic Design Between the World Wars

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. 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.

Contents

Introduction: The Photo-Typographer

1. Photographic Language: A Genealogy of Typophoto, 1923–1928

2. The Motivation of Form: Defining Legibility in Perceptual Psychology

3. Typophoto and the New Photomontage, 1928–1933

4. Too Much and Too Little: Photographic Halftones, Bare and Retouched

5. Typophoto and the Professionalization of Graphic Design: Munich Meisterschule für Deutschlands Buchdrucker, 1927–1932

Epilogue: Halftone Effects

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index