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(soft piano music)
Female 1: We're in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and we're lookin
at Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's, Climbing the Mast from 1928.
It's a gelatin silver print, and it's pretty amazing.
Female 2: It is amazing and shows one of the things
that he was known for with his new vision photography
over the use worm's-eye and bird's-eye views.
This is a classic way to see what he meant by
worm's-eye view. This unexpected angle that you
get of the climber on the mast. It's kind of jarring
and makes you stop in your tracks because it's not
the kind of positioning that you would normal expect
with a straight photograph.
Female 1: He's taken the worm's-eye view very
literally and ends up ending our expectation.
Female 2: He was always hoping that by giving us
these unexpected or what was often called oblique
angles that would lead us to think deeply about
what were looking at. You have a figure, a human
figure. I actually can't tell if it's male or female. Can you?
Female 1: Not really. I mean, it's just not important.
Female 2: It's just an athletic body climbing up
to rig up a sail boat, and you get this also
interesting shadow of the rope ladder and the
figure reflected on the sail that's been rigged.
You see it from directly underneath these almost
disembodied looking legs and the bottoms of the feet
staring at you right in the face.
Female 1: It's a totally shortened figure, and it
takes a moment and you finally see this head
peeking through the legs kind of looking at him
making eye contact.
Female 2: Then you have the wonderful wooden
mast of the ship slicing through the center of
the composition. You can also see that he has great eye
for compositional elements.
Female 1: I think there's really a strong sense
of geometry as well. Everything is divided into
sections. If you wanted to you could take apart
the entire thing and kind of piece it back together.
There's also a rhythm he sets up visually between textures,
between light and dark, between shadows, between
fabric and wood, and especially the legs, which
are really smooth, and the smoothness of the
wood that travels all the way up. Everything is
just sort of lifting us up into this.
Female 2: It creates the dynamism of motion and
movement swooping you into the composition.
We became very convinced that photography was
going to be the new language of the masses.
He actually started to refer to things like photo-literacy,
that if you didn't know how to read images
you were going to be the new illiterate.
Female 1: Photography was a definite weapon for them
in terms of communication, in terms of revolutionary
messages, in terms of art. Here it's Moholy playing
with perspective, and playing with perception,
and playing with our vision, and really forcing
us to look at things from a different point of view.
Female 2: Yes, absolutely. With Moholy a lot of times,
the subject matter, it's rarely overtly political.
For the most part for him it was more about
expanding the perception of the viewers that
would allow them to engage with those new modern language.
It was for the masses. It was political but not overtly so.
Some like [Rachanko] would use these oblique
jarring angles, but he would almost always have
subject matter that was also political, demonstrations,
you know, Little Pioneer Girl, with Moholy
it was more this general formulation still
very modern life materiel. Especially, the athleticism
of the figure, a real symbol of modernity that
he's injected that aspect of modern life.
Female 1: A temporary figure that we're looking at.
Female 2: Yes, inarguable contemporary.
(soft piano music)