Edited by Victor Anton, Photography editor.
An Article about the photographers Moholy Nagy and Trent Parke: you can see their photos at the next
Paris Photo Fair: you can find more informations about it on our website
Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York
What links Trent Parke to Laszlo Moholy Nagy? In what way one of the most innovative contemporary photojournalists may look similar to the pioneer of abstract photography from the thirties?
Lazlo Moholy Nagy was born in the late nineteenth century at Bacsborsod in the south of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the First World War, in 1920, He left his country and moved to Berlin, where he became professor at the Bauhaus teaching graphics, painting, film and photography. A brilliant experimenter of visual language, He began one of the most groundbreaking research in the field of photography: photograms, unusual perspectives and abstract details became his main subjects. His intention was to reveal how photography could reflect and show the outside world in new, or even impossible ways for the human eye. From being a purely figurative tool, the young medium of photography demonstrated its potential not only in the documentary field but also as an inquisitive and exploratory medium. Later on the hungarian born artist collected the results of this research in a book entitled “The New Vision”. And it is precisely from this title that Trent Parke, the only Australian photographer represented by Magnum Photos, seems to draw his inspiration. All the work narrates his homeland by exploring the linguistic and narrative limits of photography. For these reasons his images full of long exposures, marked contrasts and light games do not merely narrate the contemporary Australia, they seem to stage an authentic human epic.
courtesy of Trent Parke / Magnum Photos
