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Werner Gräff. Es kommt der neue Fotograf! Berlin: Reckendorf, 1929

“Importantly, the exhibition ["Film un Foto" (FiFo), Stuttgart, 1929] attracted leading modernist photographers not just from Europe but from the United States (Edward Weston, for instance), and Russia (El Lissitzky and Rodchenko). It included amateur work, commercial and utilititarian photography, and provided an almost indispensable survey of the New Vision in photography. With László Moholy-Nagy as one of the exhibition's leading organizers, the Bauhaus ethos was very much in evidence. The ideas expressed in his book Malerei Fotografie Film (Painting Photography Film) were reflected not just on the walls of the Neuen Ausstellunghallen, but in the pages of the two photobooks published around the show - Werner Gräff's Es kommt der neue Fotograf! (Here Comes the New Photographer!) and Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold's Foto-Auge (Photo-Eye). Both books are variations on Moholy-Nagy's seminal polemic, and both adopt similar picture-essay formats to run through the various genres and stylistic features of New Vision photography. Werner Gräff's volume, however, has as much of a practical as a theoretical slant. It can be considered a 'how to' compendium of the new photography, and is divided into sections, each several pages long, showing either formal strategies like tilting the frame or repeating similar elements, close-ups and so on, or genres such as photograms, montage, advertising and magazine photography.”

Martin Parr, Gerry Badger. The photobook: a history, volume I. London: Phaidon, 2004 (p. 98)

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