Hungarian artist Lázló Moholy-Nagy was clearly fascinated with light. Most of his work, it seems, used light as a medium for expression. Light-Space Modulator is a working, light-bending machine designed by Moholy-Nagy in 1930. While the physical portion of the piece is amazingly complex and beautiful by itself (a revolving mass of gears, glass, metal grates, etc.), what it creates is the true piece. Light is projected on and through it, and the resultant shadows and bounced/refracted light creates an ever-changing painting of sorts (his paint being, of course, light itself).Other examples of Moholy-Nagy’s work also draws heavily on the effects of light.
Photogram Number 1 - the Mirror, created in 1922-1928, is an image created, again, by light. By using a looking glass to create shadows and highlights on top of light sensitive paper, and then moving it, he created various shapes which closely resemble mirrors. So in this piece, not only is light one of his tools, it is also the subject. Light-Space Modulator makes use of reflective surfaces to produce its amazing effects, and it seems that Moholy-Nagy was already working with this idea nearly a decade before the contraption was produced. And interestingly, the image on the photogram is somewhat similar to the image created by the Light-Space Modulator.
One of the major departures Moholy-Nagy made from more traditional art was that light was no longer just a piece of some larger picture. Photographers, for example, used light in order to capture an image of physical things. It was a tool, as it was for Moholy-Nagy in his earlier pieces, but the characters or things in their pictures were their subjects. Not light itself. How, then, could one capture light?
Moholy-Nagy seems to have found the perfect way with his piece. If one concentrates not on the jumble of metal and glass Moholy-Nagy constructed, but instead on what is projected on the wall behind it, the effect is quite beautiful and makes one think differently about light in general.
