“Vision in motion”: László Moholy-Nagy and the Genesis of the Visual Book

Abstract

This essay aims to analyze the ways in which László Moholy-Nagy’s concepts of “new typography” and “typophoto” were essential to the creation of a new typology of publications: visual books, which have a strong image component, resulting from the popularization of photography and cinema. New typography was defined in 1923 by László Moholy-Nagy in a short text for the catalog of the Bauhaus exhibition Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar 1919–1923. New typography resulted from a new graphical orientation by Bauhaus, influenced by the ideology of several avant-garde movements, such as De Stijl and Russian Constructivism, that celebrated simplification, geometrization and the advantages of modern technology to construct a visual language that could communicate clearly and in a universal manner. In Moholy-Nagy’s text, new typography called for an analysis of the relation between form and content through the collapsing of the “classic model” (the “old typography”) and the objective use of photography. In 1925, Moholy-Nagy introduced the notion of typophoto in Painting, Photography, Film to realize the “bioscopic book” of El Lissitzky, which is more visual than textual. In publications like the exhibition catalog Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar 1919–1923 or the Bauhausbücher series, Moholy-Nagy puts both principles into practice, converting the book into a space of visual exploration, endowed with a cinematic dimension that comes close to his notion of “vision in motion”. Through the use of a qualitative research methodology, and based on a critical review of literature and the direct observation of case studies, this essay aims to show how Moholy-Nagy’s multidisciplinary legacy contributed to a paradigm shift in book design.