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László Moholy-Nagy. Malerei, Fotografie, Film. München: Albert Langen, 1925
“Moholy-Nagy wrote his first book, Malerei, Fotografie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film) in the summer of 1924. It was published in 1925 as the eighth volume of the Bauhaus series. Moholy-Nagy was its creator in several senses: as series editor, as author and as photographer. In accordance with the artist’s particular talents, the book has a double aspect, verbal and visual. It is a synthesis of Moholy-Nagy’s earlier ideas, creative activity and already published writings –a synthesis in the name of the Bauhaus ideal (…) Malerei, Fotografie, Film deals with the relationship and antagonism between the traditional and the new genres (pigment and light; easel painting and photography, film, advertising display)”.
Krisztina Passuth. Moholy-Nagy. London: Thames and Hudson, 1985 (p. 47)
“The promotion of the "new photography" in Germany as a force of change was largely due to Moholy-Nagy. In the first edition of Malerei, Fotografie, Film, he noted that the possible uses of photography were uncountable, giving as exemples reality photos, advertising posters and political propaganda, book and advertising layouts, and material for nonobjective light projections. Moholy-Nagy's inclusion of press photographs and other anonymous pictures in the book also set the precedent for the incorporation of such photographs in the various major photo exhibitions that began in the mid-1920s”.
Victor Margolin. The struggle for utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997 (p. 155)
“Malerei Photographie, Film, is a photobook in three sections: a forty-page text, a ninety-page sequence of one hundred photographs on glossy paper, and finally a fourteen-page film script, “Dynamik der Gross-Stadt”, that melds text, graphic signs, and photographs. The book situates photography in a chronological continuum between painting (Moholy-Nagy’s background) and film (Moholy-Nagy’s future). Accordingly, the film script seems like an intermediary stage in which the book is on the brink of becoming a film. The architectural experience of the contemporary metropolis provides the resources to leap forward to the next step in the evolution of visual culture.”
André Tavares. The anatomy of the architectural book. Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture; Zürich: Lars Müller, 2016 (p. 241)