5 Great Pioneering Photographers

Early photography at its best

Pioneer with a horn (1930) by Alexander Rodchenko. Image source WikiArt

The work of early photographers constitutes some of the most arresting and alluring images in the history of all photography.

Here I touch on the style of five pioneering photographers working around the early part of the 20th century. I hope you enjoy their work as much as I do.

László Moholy-Nagy

Hungarian-born László Moholy-Nagy was a painter and sculptor, who became a professor at the German Bauhaus school of art and design following an invitation by Walter Gropius in 1923.

Moholy-Nagy embraced photography as a vital new artistic medium and was a true experimenter. As an artist, he saw new technologies as part of a utopian optimism for the future of design and society. He was also one of the first interwar artists to utilise scientific equipment such as the microscope and radiography in the making of his work.

Xanti Schawinsky on a Bauhaus balcony (c. 1928) by László Moholy-Nagy. Image source WikiArt

For Moholy-Nagy, photography allowed him to create a method of depicting the world unimpeded by the subjectivity of the human eye. He coined the term Neues Sehen (New Vision) to describe this sense of photographic perception.