Sunday, December 11, 2011

In Full Spectrum. Photography 1900-1950 from the Collection of the Moravian Gallery in Brno. 3rd part: Advertising.

Advertising photography
New photography and advertising photography were born simultaneously, and can be hardly viewed separately. Precise description, the core of the New Objectivity, was also pivotal to promotional work. Examples of advertising photography invariably show objects as part of abstract patterns, in order to deprive them of any presumed position within the coordinates of the ordinary world, so bird's-eye views became common. Photo-montage (Vaclav Jiru and others) was also frequent. The colour effects in Taborsky's photographs are achieved by photographic chemistry. In Rossler's shots, the objects represented appear to be in a state of weightlessness, floating in an undefined space, while in other photos series of products create geometrical structures and symbolize both mass use as well as profusion and abundance (Adolf Schneeberger, Vladislav Scholz). Some artists favoured a combination of disparate space dimensions and plans, details and wholes (Otakar Lenhart, Hugo Taborsky), while others employed, perhaps inadvertently, the principles of Gestalt psychology, a discipline that was finding form at the time.

Bohumil Stastny

Franz Fiedler
Grete Popper
Vladislav Scholz


* text and images from the exhibition *