"We today have recognized photography as an essential typographic tool of
the present. We find its addition to the means of typographic expression an
enrichment, and see in photography exactly the factor that distinguishes
our typography from everything that went before" (p. 92).
One should point out that there is a distinction to be made between pho
tography used as a means of reproduction in the processes of printing and
the printed reproduction of photographic prints. Tschichold's discussion,
like many others, ·blurs the two phenomena. He is essentially concerned
with the second - the evident presence of photography in prin ting - and
not with the first phenomenon, which includes fundamental but hardly visi
ble innovations like photolithographic printing and (then still hardly devel
oped) photocomposition of text.
The argument for the photographic image paralleled that for sanserif
(equally disliked by traditionalists); and the two elements could then be
joined in "typo-photo."47 This- the conjunction or juxtaposition of text and
image - was really the defining method of New Typography in using
images, and can be regarded as one of its lasting legacies, now so gener
ally employed as to be unnoticed or called simply "graphic design." But, at
this point, the issues surrounding photography were still contested.
Through the common ground of typo-photo, New Typography spilled over
easily into the parallel "new photography" movement. Thus Tschichold was
one of a three-person executive committee for the Deutscher Werkbund's
seminal "Film und Foto" exhibition, held in Stuttgart in 1929, and for which
he also designed stationery. He was also the designer and joint author,
with his friend Franz Roh, of the book that arose from this exhibition, fo to
auge.48
THE NEW BOOK
The last of the "principal categories of typography" to be considered is the
book: apparently the stronghold of traditionalists, but also the subject of
some recent visionary speculation. Tschichold describes and reproduces
examples of work that breaks with conventional procedures of book design.
Behind such work lay the hypothesis that the form of the book should
adapt to new needs and new patterns of life (more active, more visual, a
quicker tempo). Postulations of this kind were in the air then, and have
resurfaced in various guises since. Certainly books were then becoming
more visual. The integration of pictures with text was becoming technically
easier, with developments in lithographic and gravure printing. The "inte
grated book, " with pictures placed beside the text relating to them, wouldxxxiii