Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo. Painting Photography Film by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

MIT, 1973. Wraps, 150 pages, reprint of 1925 edition, very good with crimp on front cover. [A classic by one of the 20th century's most influential artists, photographers,  and teachers who taught at the Bauhaus.] Wraps, 150 pages, very good with crimps on covers, light spots on fore edge. 

László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) was a Hungarian-born painter, sculptor, photographer, and influential Bauhaus master who pioneered the integration of technology, light, and industrial design into modern art. After moving to Germany following World War I, Moholy-Nagy joined the Bauhaus faculty in Weimar in 1923, where he advocated for photography as an essential modern visual language capable of creating a "New Vision." Embracing light as a primary medium, he coined the term "photogram" for camera-less photographs produced by placing objects directly onto photosensitive paper, while also experimenting with radical camera angles, photomontage, and kinetic light sculptures like his famed Light-Space Modulator. Forced to leave Europe during the rise of Nazism, he immigrated to the United States in 1937 and founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago (later the IIT Institute of Design), cementing his legacy as a visionary educator and avant-garde theorist who fundamentally reshaped 20th-century photography and design.

Painting, Photography, Film is a 150-page translated edition of the groundbreaking avant-garde text by Hungarian artist and visionary educator László Moholy-Nagy. First published in English by Lund Humphries in 1969 and issued as a paperback by The MIT Press in 1973, the book is a translation by Janet Seligman of the author's original 1925 Bauhausbook (Malerei, Fotografie, Film). It includes a contextual note by Hans M. Wingler and a postscript by Otto Stelzer, serving as a pillar of modern media theory.

Overview of the Book

• The Author: László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) was an influential master at the Bauhaus in Germany, where he co-edited the Bauhausbücher (Bauhaus Books) series with Walter Gropius and pioneered radical new approaches to design, typography, and visual media.

• Structure: The volume combines dense, manifesto-style theoretical essays with 100 pages of integrated black-and-white visual plates. These illustrations serve as a deliberate narrative sequence rather than mere back-ups to the text, juxtaposing scientific imaging with fine art.

• The Premise: Moholy-Nagy argues that traditional easel painting has reached its limits in a mechanized world. He asserts that light itself, captured and manipulated through technology, is the ultimate modern creative medium.

Core Concepts and Themes

The book operates as a radical conceptual map predicting how mass media and technological reproduction would transform human perception.

• The New Vision: Moholy-Nagy challenges the idea that photography should merely replicate human sight or copy classical painting styles. Instead, he outlines a "New Vision," advocating for extreme angles, bird's-eye views, worm's-eye perspectives, and macro-imaging to reveal patterns hidden to the naked human eye.

• Production vs. Reproduction: A central philosophical argument distinguishes between using technology to simply copy existing art (reproduction) and using it to uncover entirely new visual experiences (production). To illustrate production, he champions camera-less photography like "photograms" (or rayographs), where objects are placed directly onto light-sensitive paper to capture pure, abstract interactions of shadow and light.

• Typophoto and Kinetic Art: The book serves as a manifesto for "typophoto"—the integration of typography and photographic image into a single visual language for modern communication. Additionally, the final section looks forward to the future of cinema, laying out ideas for abstract, kinetic "light-displays" and synchronized sound film that would bridge static visual art and temporal performance.