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Expressionist theatre and cinema in Germany, using multiple lamps
and mirrors to produce stylized and unnatural effects. In his photog-
raphy he explored the belief that human identity will always elude the
single, static image. In a bourgeois culture quick to embrace the defini-
tive portrait of the citizen (the police mug shot, the passport photo),
Lerski’s approach was unsettling. His circling of his subjects, a literal
embodiment of Vertov’s call for the multiple portrait, was in stark
contrast to the work of his celebrated contemporary August Sander.^14
Where Sander aimed to make representative images of ‘typical’ Germans,
Lerski aimed for the opposite. WithMetamorphosis Through Light( 1936 )
the idea was pushed to its limit. He photographed the head of one man
175 different ways. Perusing the project one becomes less and less sure
what the man actually looks like and quite clueless as to who or what he
‘is’. Lerski sought a form for his ideas somewhere between photography
and film, in which the factual promise of each still image could be
deferred to another and another. In 1938 a slide show from the series
ran for several weeks before the main feature at the Academy Cinema
in London. Decades ahead of the slippery masquerades of Cindy
Sherman’s photography (see chapter Four), Lerski produced a cine-
matographic performance of a face, a mercurial façade beyond any
knowable person.^15
What Lerski sought in the face, Moï Ver sought in the city. His book
Paris( 1931 ) forced photography through every conceivable variant of
montage – sequences, series, double printing, multiple exposure, Cubist
collage, Constructivist assembly and Surrealist juxtaposition.^16 The
individual shots are unremarkable, but the assembly is ceaselessly
inventive, using Paris to explore photography and photography to
explore Paris. There are few fixed points of reference. Instead, Moï Ver
accepts that a report on the modern city is going to be fugitive, layered
and contradictory, beyond a totalizing grasp. In 1929 the writer Siegfried
Kracauer had come to the same conclusion:
The street in the extended sense of the word is not only the arena
of fleeting impressions and chance encounters but a place where
the flow of life is bound to assert itself. Again one will have to think
22 Page spread from MoïVer’sParis
(1931).