on the technological elements of the process, to the
point where he calls the artist himself a mechanical
apparatus. Likewise, in the Surrealist context,
Andre ́Breton would equate Rayograph production
with the automatic utterances of the unconscious,
as examples of the uncoded self-representation that
is only possible to achieve through a neutralized,
inanimate conduit. Man Ray himself, however,
remained undecided, vacillating between the artistic
validation that the phrase ‘‘painting with light’’
implies, his ongoing engagement with chance pro-
cesses that seemed to refute those claims to author-
ship, and his habit of turning his photographic
innovations toward commercial, rather than artistic
gain. His 1931 book of photograms, a promotional
vehicle for the Paris Electric Company entitled
Electricite ́, is cynically prescient of the uses that
advertising would make of Surrealist motifs.
The third interwar figure to theorize and dissemi-
nate photography without an apparatus was also
the artist who, in his 1925 bookPainting, Photo-
graphy, Film, named the images ‘‘photograms.’’
La ́szlo ́ Moholy-Nagy was a Constructivist and
Bauhaus artist whose interest in the medium was
sparked through his contacts with the Dadaists, but
who eventually made photograms central to his
exploration of the essential formal elements of
photography, a project radically different from
Dada critique. Moholy-Nagy called his photo-
grams ‘‘light compositions,’’ comparing the med-
ium-specific role of light in photography to the
role of color in painting and sound in music, and
thus positioning photograms (and by extension,
photography) within established artistic discourse,
rather than isolating the ways the medium worked
against those traditions. His early photograms,
published inBroom(1923), were distinctly flatter
than Man Ray’s, perhaps in an effort to distinguish
his work from the Dada anti-aesthetic, but later he
would make use of the full range of tonal and
spatial possibilities of the medium, manipulating
transparency and opacity to produce a non-refer-
ential, yet apparently dimensional mode of photo-
graphic abstraction governed, as he put it ‘‘by
optical laws peculiar to itself.’’ Yet Moholy-
Nagy’s project was much more complex than a set
of exercises in formal composition: to the extent
that his photograms ‘‘dematerialized’’ objects,
making reality strange through photography, they
can be linked to Constructivist imperatives to
reconcile art and design and to investigate, in his
words, ‘‘a new instrument of vision.’’
Moholy-Nagy’s characterization of photograms
as primal would seem to preclude any validation
on his part of the mechanical aspect of photography;
he understood photograms as a liberating form in
that they were freed from the camera as well as from
referential representation. Yet he was oddly at-
tracted to the mechanical-as-automatic aspect of
the medium, and his long engagement with photo-
grams can be traced to the same impulse to deskill-
ing that had led him, in 1922 (the same year he made
his first photogram) to make his so-called telephone
paintings—works produced remotely, by dictating
instructions to a signmaker over the phone. His
experiments with light as the visual manifestation
of energy in motion continued after his move to
the Chicago Bauhaus, where a number of artists,
among them photographer and educator Arthur
Siegel, Gyorgy Kepes, Henry Holmes Smith, and
sculptor Theodore Roszak emerged from his light
laboratory committed to photogram production.
In spite of Moholy-Nagy’s early links to materi-
alism, at least one member of the Soviet avant-garde,
Constructivist El Lissitzky, disparaged Moholy’s
photogramsastepidderivativesofManRay’spic-
torial innovations. Lissitzky himself made a number
of straightforward photograms in the late 1920s
(among them several cyanotypes), but in keeping
with the Constructivist dictum that insisted on fac-
tuality against aestheticism, he would stop short of
pure abstraction. Nevertheless, elimination of the
camera’s validation of classical perspective resonates
with the general critique of the Cartesian model
effected by Lissitzky’s axonometric Prouns; like the
Dadas, Lissitzky was interested in images without a
fixed point of view, and it is likely that the photo-
gram’s attraction for him lay in its construction of
imaginary space.
In fact, Lissitzky’s photographic experiments
began during what could be called a Dada interlude
in Berlin, where from 1922–1925 he was in steady
contact with members of the avant-garde such as
Kurt Schwitters, Jean Arp, and Raoul Hausmann,
and where he managed to acquire five Rayographs.
His 1929 essay on photography grounds the medium
in the photographic material itself—light, strategi-
cally cast shadow, and sensitized surface—rather
than in the camera, and focuses particularly on the
photogram’s capacity to make photography over
as art, a transformative process he called ‘‘fotopis’.’’
Consistent with his materialist views, Lissitzky would
not directly call attention to the photogram as the
essence of photography, but unlike Moholy and the
Dadaists, his attitude by 1929 does seem to reflect a
degree of disenchantment with technological ration-
alism, and a nostalgia for an ethos of unmotivated
artistic creation.
Lissitzky’s first photograms, one of which,4i
Lamp (Heliokonstruktion 125 Volt)was publishedPHOTOGRAM