John Heartfield and the industrial advertisements designed by Max
Burchartz.
We show here a good example: the cover of a folder for industrial leaflets
designed by Burchartz. The illustration sadly gives only a hint of the intense
and rich effect of the original. Further examples of photomontage will be
found elsewhere in this book.
Photograms are photos created with the use of light-sensitive paper with
out a camera. This simple technique is not new; photograms of flowers, for
example, made by simply laying the object on photographic paper. have
been known for a long time.
The inventor of the photogram as an art form is the American Man Ray, now
living in Paris. He published his first works in this field in 1922 in the
American magazine Broom. They reveal an unreal, supernatural world cre
ated purely by photography. These poetic images have nothing in common
with reporters' or ordinary photographers' work, with which they have as
much connection as poetry has with daily speech. It would be naive to call
these productions either accidental or clever arrangements: any expert will
recognize the difference. In them, the potentials of autonomous photogra
phy (without camera) have for the first time been realized in pure form: by
the use of modern materials the photogram has become the modern poetry
of form•
Photograms, too, can be used in advertising. El Lissitzky was the first to
make photogram advertisements, in 1924. A splendid example of his work
in this field is the photogram for Pelikan ink (see opposite). Even the let
tering is photo-mechanical.•• Although the mechanics of making a pho
togram are simple, they are nevertheless too complicated to describe in a
few words. Anyone who sets himself such a task will, by his own experi
ments, find a way to achieve the desired effect. All that is needed is light
sensitive paper and a darkroom. We may mention here the book Malerei,
Photographie, Film by L. Moholy-Nagy, which deals with this subject at
length and most instructively.
The typographer who has to integrate halftone photographic blocks with
given type must ask what typeface should be used in these conditions. The
pre-war artists who rejected photography, as I described above, tried to
- Two of Man Ray·s photograms are shown on pp. 48 and 49.
•• Only an unthinking observer could argue that the use of roman type for one word in this pho
togram was illogical. The desire to use simple means for the design led to the use of a non
manual standard type- a stencil letter, which had to be in roman because stencil sanserif is not
yet available.