TYPOPHOTO

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
from
Painting, Photography, Film
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
Pgs. 38-40

With a note by Hans M. Wingler and a postscript by Otto Stelzer
Translated by Janet Seligman
MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts
© 1967, Florian Kufeberg Verlag, Mainz
© 1969, English Translation, Lund Humphries, London

Publishers’ note
This is a translation of Malerrei, Fotograrfie, Film which originally appeared as Volume 8 in the
Bauhaüsbcher series in 1925 (second edition 1927). The German edition was reissued in 1967 in
facsimile in the series Neue Beuhaushücher by Florian Kupferberg Verlag, Mainz.

TYPOPHOTO
Neither curiosity nor economic considerations alone but a deep human interest in what happens in the world have brought about the enormous expansion of the news-service: typography, the film and the radio.

The creative work of the artist, the scientist’s experiments, the calculations of the business-man or the present-day politician, all that moves, all that shapes, is bound up in the collectivity of interacting events. The individual’s immediate action of the moment always has the effect of simultaneity in the long term. The technician has his machine at hand: satisfaction of the needs of the moment. But basically much more: he is the pioneer of the new social stratification, he paves the way for the future.

The printer’s work, for example, to which we still pay too little attention has just such a long-term effect: international understanding and its consequences.

The printer’s work is part of the foundation on which the new world will be built. Concentrated work of organization is the spiritual result which brings all elements of human creativity into a synthesis: the play instinct, sympathy, inventions, economic necessities. One man invents printing with movable type, another photography, a third screen-printing and stereotype, the next electrotype, phototype, the celluloid plate hardened by light. Men still kill one another, they have not yet understood how they live, why they live; politicians fail to observe that the earth is an entity, yet television (Telehor) has been invented: the ‘Far Seer’ tomorrow we shall be able to look into the heart of our fellow-man, be everywhere and yet be alone; illustrated books, newspapers, magazines are printed - in millions. The unambiguousness of the real, the truth in the everyday situation is there for all classes. The hygiene of the optical, the health of the visible is slowly filtering through.

What is typophoto?
Typography is communication composed in type.
Photography is the visual presentation of what can be optically apprehended.
Typophoto is the visually most exact rendering of communication.

Every period has its own optical focus. Our age: that of the film ; the electric sign, simultaneity of sensorily perceptible events. It has given us a new, progressively developing creative basis for typography too. Gutenberg’s typography, which has endured almost to our own day, moves exclusively in the linear dimension. The intervention of the photographic process has extended it to a new dimensionality, recognised today as total. The preliminary work in this field was done by the illustrated papers, posters and by display printing.

Until recently type face and type setting rigidly preserved a technique which admittedly guaranteed the purity of the linear effect but ignored the new dimensions of life. Only quite recently has there been typographic work which uses the contrasts of typographic material (letters, signs, positive and negative values of the plane) in an attempt to establish a correspondence with modern life. These efforts have, however, done little to relax the inflexibility that has hitherto existed in typographic practice An effective loosening-up can be achieved only by the most sweeping and all-embracing use of the techniques of photography, zincography the electrotype, etc. The flexibility and elasticity of these techniques bring with them a new reciprocity between economy and beauty With the development of photo-telegraphy, which enables reproductions and accurate illustrations to be made instantaneously evenphilosophical at works will presumably use the same means though on a higher plane as the present clay American magazines. The form of these new typographic works will, of course, be quite different typographically, optically, and synopticaliy from the linear typography of today.

Linear typography communicating ideas is merely a mediating makeshift link between the content of the communication and the person receiving it:

COMMUNICATION TYPOGRAPHY PERSON

Instead of using typography-as hitherto-merely as an objective means, the attempt is now being made to incorporate it and the potential effects of its subjective existence creatively into the contents.
The typographical materials themselves contain strongly optical tangibilities by means of which they can render the content of the communication in a directly visible - not only in an indirectly intellectual - fashion. Photography is highly effective when used as typographical material. It may appear as illustration beside the words, or in the form of ‘phototext’ in place of words, as a precise form of representation so objective as to permit of no individual interpretation. The form, the rendering is constructed out of the optical and associative relationships: into a visual,
associative, conceptual, synthetic continuity: into the typo-photo as an unambiguous rendering in an optically valid form.

The typophoto governs the new tempo of the new visual literature.

In the future every printing press will possess its own block-making plant and it can be confidently stated that the future of typographic methods lies with the photo-mechanical processes. The invention of the photographic typesetting machine, the possibility of printing whole editions with X-ray radiography, the new cheap techniques of block making, etc., indicate the trend to which every typographer or typophotographer must adapt himself as soon as possible.

This mode of modern synoptic communication may be broadly pursued on another plane by means of the kinetic process, the film.