making photograms. As the dark rooms weren’t ready
at the beginning of the semester, it also gave Smith an
opportunity to show the students how to make a
camera-less image using only bright light sources
and printing-out-paper without the use of developers.
Under Moholy-Nagy’s tutelage, photography was
taught as a basic property of the manipulation of
light.Itwasintegratedintoanartanddesigncurri-
culum and was taught experimentally. Most impor-
tantly, it was considered central to a vocabulary of
modernism. In Moholy-Nagy’s New Bauhaus foun-
dation courses on the subject of light, students not
only learned to make photograms, but also experi-
mented with solarization, a halo effect obtained by
interrupting development and giving the film a sec-
ond but short exposure; and light-modulator exer-
cises. Introduced by Kepes, head of the Light
Workshop, these experimentations required students
to design objects from a single piece of white paper
and to apply a single light source; the resulting light
play may be translated by photography into a series
of tonal ranges.
The Department of Photography at the Institute
of Design was established when the school was reor-
ganized just prior to Moholy-Nagy’s death in 1946.
Over the years, the instructors in this department,
which include Harry Callahan (head of the Depart-
ment of Photography 1949–1961), Arthur Siegel
(program head 1946–1949, part-time instructor in
the 1950s and 1960s, and chairman Department of
Photography from 1971–1978), and Aaron Siskind
(faculty 1951–1971; program head in 1961) shared
with their students a concern with photographic
process and craftsmanship, an approach that deter-
mined a particular style of photography that is both
expressive and rigorously formal. The images pro-
duced at the school—whether they are Moholy’s
photograms, Callahan’s high-contrast landscapes,
or Siskind’s wall abstractions—set new standards
for photographic experimentation.
Graduates from the ID had many options; some
found successful careers in commercial fields, jour-
nalism, and social reform. Others went on to teach at
colleges and universities throughout the country:
Harold Allen, Barbara Crane, and Kenneth Joseph-
son have had distinguished teaching careers at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago. One of the 33
initial students in 1937, Nathan Lerner graduated in
1941 and went on to head the school’s photography
department and eventually became the head of pro-
duction design. Upon graduation in 1949, Art Sin-
sabaugh remained for a decade to head the ID’s
evening photography program until 1959 when he
was appointed the director of the photography and
cinematography department at the University of
Illinois Urbana-Champaign. After Callahan’s de-
parture in 1961, Joseph Jachna taught alongside
Siskind at the ID until 1969 when he joined the
faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The city of Chicago and surrounding country-
side provided abundant subject matter for ID stu-
dents intending to document the form, figures, or
built environment of the urban spaces. In their
graduate thesis projects, many students chose to
emphasize social commentary over formalism. A
model for some of the documentary work of the
ID was the impressive record compiled by the
photographers who worked for the Farm Security
Administration (FSA) and its successor, the Office
of War Information (OWI). In the late 1930s and
early 1940s, the FSA/OWI sent several of its staff,
in particular, Jack Delano, Russell Lee, and John
Vachon to photograph the Chicago area, during
the years when the ID was establishing itself.
These images were available in academic studies
and the popular press. Adopting a documentary
stance, during 1935–1940, Nathan Lerner availed
himself of opportunities to photograph around
Chicago’s Maxwell Street recording the inhabitants
and rundown storefronts. Yasuhiro Ishimoto and
Marvin Newman followed the Maxwell traditions
in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Photographing the city’s architecture was a nat-
ural outcome of the school’s involvement with
architecture design. Arthur Siegel made a contribu-
tion to documenting Chicago architecture when he
challenged his students with an assignment to pro-
duce Chicago’sFamous Buildings(1965). Some stu-
dents, in particular Richard Nickel, who made
Louis Sullivan the subject of his senior thesis, con-
tinued to photograph architecture in Chicago and
elsewhere around the country for years.
Nickel’s unpublished master’s thesis of 1957,A
Photographic Documentation of the Architecture of
Adler and Sullivan, explains his search for Adler and
Sullivan buildings. Assiduously recording every
detail of the buildings in photographs and in writ-
ten notes, Nickel’s documentary search evolved
into an obsession to save Adler and Sullivan build-
ings from being torn down. He found himself
enmeshed with preservationists in efforts to obtain
landmark status for among others the Garrick
Theater and the Chicago Stock Exchange Building.
When these preservation goals failed, Nickels
attempted to save architectural remnants of the
buildings that were destined to be torn down. Nick-
els saved hundreds of pieces of Adler and Sullivan
ornament from the first fretwork at the Albert Sul-
livan house during the 1950s to the Stock Exchange
column he saved in 1972, the day before his acci-UNITED STATES: THE MIDWEST, PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE