El Lissitzky, Dessau
El Lissitzky, Dessau (1930) is a photocollage by the German artist Josef Albers of Russian artist, designer, and a friend El Lissitzky. In the photocollage, Albers presents his subject from two angles, on the left, the vertical format shows Lissitzky smiling and looking into the camera. In contrast, the horizontal format on the right shows Lissitzky talking while looking away from the camera. El Lissitzky, Dessau is not simply a portrait but also an exploration of the new media of photography and even film. This is demonstrated in another collage that Albers made the same year, El Lissitzky (1930), in which he showed Lissitzky in a sequence of poses that are reminiscent of images in a film reel or a contact print.
Photography was a lesser-known aspect of Josef Albers’s career, though he produced hundreds of photographs during the 1920s and 1930s. Albers’s experimentation with photography began during his years at the Bauhaus school, which he joined as faculty in 1923 and remained there until the school’s dissolution in 1933. His interest in photography coincided with the experimental climate at the Bauhaus school, in 1925 his colleague László Moholy-Nagy published the book Painting Photography Film, which argued that the new visual media like photography and film were best equipped to capture the essence of the industrialized society. Photocollages such as El Lissitzky, Dessau reflected the Bauhaus spirit as the technique combined the mechanical process of photography with the handcrafted element of collage.
Even though photocollages were not unique to Albers, they are fundamentally different than those of his contemporaries like Max Ernst, El Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy, who integrated several photographs into one image or incorporated drawing and found images into the collage. Therefore, one of Albers’ inspirations could have been the new popular picture magazines. The magazines presented a collection of photographs across a two-page spread, aiming to present a cohesive narrative or culminated truth. Similarly, Albers’ collages assembled several photographs to create meaning from the interaction generated between the chosen images. In the case of El Lissitzky, Dessau, the two contrasting images show the different perceptions of the subject.
Although Albers’s photographs were largely unknown until after he died in 1976, the arrangements of his photocollages demonstrate originality and innovation. This type of technique can be seen later in the works of photographers such as Dorothea Lange’s Ancestor Worship (1953) and Ray K. Metzker’s Untitled (c. 1969). Besides, the geometric arrangements in Albers’s photocollages anticipate some of his later preoccupations as a painter: serial variations, studies of perception, and the use of a “square” as a graphic device.
Albers’s active engagement with photography was relatively brief, it lasted about five years between 1928 and 1933. In 1943, Albers delivered his only lecture about photography titled Photos as Photography and Photos as Art. In the talk, Albers summed up some of his thoughts about the young medium of photography, saying that it “has all the advantages and disadvantages of childhood. It is still unafraid of spontaneity and directness”.
