The Mechanics of Expression

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It has enticed its practitioners into realms of experiment and speculation, and inspired them to produce works that are equal parts science and self-expression.  Even as the medium evolved artistically toward a documentary precision and a fidelity to appearances, it developed an alternative history, a tradition of testing the boundaries of the visual.  The artists in this exhibition have carried that tradition forward in dramatic ways.  They have given free rein to photographic processes, embraced abstraction, explored extreme ideas of form and adapted the oldest photographic tools to new uses and formats.

Profoundly influenced by Moholy-Nagy, Otto Steinert (1915-1978) led an heroic effort after World War II to revive the investigative essence of Bauhaus photography.  Forming the Fotoform group in 1949, Steinert organized an epochal series of exhibitions that broke with the conventions of documentary realism that largely defined the medium.  Championing what he called subjective photography, Steinert and the Fotoform artists sought to reforge the links between photography’s experimental, nonobjective elements and the inner experience of both viewer and photographer. Egyptian-born Sameer Makarius (1924-2009) established his own photo group, Forum, in Buenos Aires.  Makarius was one of Argentina’s premier documentarians but also one of the medium’s most radical practitioners. Also influenced by Moholy-Nagy, he merged painting and photography through the use of cliché verre – creating his own abstract negatives on glass.  Finally, the contemporary work of Vera Lutter (b. 1960) has embodied this experimental spirit in photography by looking forward and back simultaneously. Lutter has revived the prephotographic device of the camera obscura to create large, one-of-a-kind negative pinhole images of New York City.  Her focus on industrial sites evokes a city of labor and production, but one long since undergoing transformation. Also shown are works by Peter Keetman and Ludwig Windstosser.

All five of these photographers offer viewers a new role – as explorers of visual worlds far beyond the range of normal seeing.  As Steinert wrote, “Photography gives us for the first time a feeling of the structure of things with an intensity which the eye, limited by its accommodation, had hitherto been quite unable to perceive.”