lished and co-edited, with the legendary graphic
designer Jan Tschichold, the decade-defining cata-
logueFoto-Auge[Photo Eye] and co-curated the
seminal exhibitionFilm und Foto. This summary
exhibition of the new modernist imagery was mas-
sive and a resounding success. After appearing in
Stuttgart, the exhibition traveled to six venues
worldwide: Zurich, Vienna, Danzig (now Gdansk,
Poland), Agram (now Zagreb, Croatia), and Tokyo
and Osaka in Japan. The curators and the regional
advisors included La ́szlo ́ Moholy-Nagy (Ger-
many), Piet Zwart (Holland), El Lissitzky (Soviet
Union), Fritz Gruber (Switzerland), Edward Wes-
ton (USA), and others, and Hans Richter was the
judge for cinema. They assumed that the exhibition
and catalogue of the 1200 photographs by 187
photographers would define for the generations to
follow 1920s experimental photography. Roh wrote
an essay for the catalogue that defined an historical
context for his own innovative photographs which
were included in the exhibition and the New Vision
imagery of, among others, Herbert Bayer, Andreas
Feininger, Hannah Ho ̈ch, El Lissitzky, La ́szlo ́
Moholy-Nagy, Walter Peterhans, Man Ray, and
Maurice Tabard. He wrote:
Our book does not only mean to say ‘‘the world is
beautiful,’’ but also: the world is exciting, cruel and
weird....there are five kinds of applied photography:
the reality-photo, the photogram, photomontage, photo
with etching or painting, and photos in connection with
typography.
In references to Pictorialism, the international
style thatFilm und Fotowas mounted in opposition
to, Roh wrote:
...to a new world of objects we find the old seen anew....
for a long time we had photographers who clad every-
thing in twilight (imitators of Rembrandt in velvet cap...).
today everything is brought out clearly. ...[seen anew
by] ‘‘wrong’’ focalizing...the use of the same plate over
again....the audacious sight from and above and below
endorsing the imagery.
Roh addressed his own personal camera work—
the negative print—this way:
...a further variety of... reality-photo...[is] the negative
print. The principle of inversion is known in arrangement
of abstract forms, as applied in weaving and....in music
too....why should not the same principle be applied to
exterior realities...? Besides the inversion of direction, an
inversion of light–and–dark is well possible. This, for the
present, specifically photographic charm cannot be
experienced elsewhere, for the distinction between a
day and night view of the same reality is quite a different
thing. we might perhaps speak of a world in the majorand the minor key, to indicate at least the completely
changed expression of tone values.From 1927 to 1933, when he actively photo-
graphed, Roh explored two invented visions: sur-
real collages/montages of figure and landscape, and
the negative print. But it was the negative print and
its polarized tonalities reminiscent of the photo-
gram that allowed Roh to redefine photographic
reality by compressing perspective, transposing
highlights and shadows, de-eroticizing the seden-
tary model, and stripping from places, objects, indi-
viduals, and landscapes all references to other art
forms and even photographic classicism. His tech-
nical mastery of the process solidified Roh’s place in
the pantheon of Europe’s experimental photo-
graphic elite, as his photographs fused the visions,
perspectives, and processes that categorized Eur-
opean photographic modernism.
Roh said that he began his photographic career
in 1927 and worked until his arrest and three-
month internment, in 1933, in the Nazi concentra-
tion camp in Dachau. Roh wrote that his first
wife’s intervention on his behalf directly to Hein-
rich Himmler, then Police Commissioner of Mu-
nich and later the official most responsible for the
Final Solution, resulted in Roh’s release. Roh ap-
parently never photographed again.
Though his photographic career was brief, Roh’s
images were an essential part of the 1920s moder-
nist effort that uprooted, reengineered, and recali-
brated the relationship between what we see and
what we see through camera vision. Light and sha-
dow became, in his work, bulky massed tones. By
compressing highlights and shadows into a chalky
gray mid-range hue that obscured more than it
revealed, Roh gerrymandered photography’s nor-
mal tonal palette of black to white. Roh presented
uneventful public acts—individuals crossing brid-
ges on foot or in automobiles, workers and vendors
in the street, or pedestrian groups converging on
spacious unpopulated plazas or intersections—and
simple private observances such as reading and
bathing in a manner free of narrative entanglement,
divorced from history and thus congruent with
early modernist thinking.
AlanCohen
Seealso:Bayer, Herbert; Feininger, Andreas; His-
tory of Photography: Twentieth-Century Develop-
ments; Ho ̈ch, Hannah; Man Ray; Modernism;
Moholy-Nagy, La ́szlo ́; Peterhans, Walter; Photo-
gram; Photography in Germany and Austria;
Tabard, Maurice; Weston, Edward; Zwart, PietROH, FRANZ