Between the World Wars, ideas about meaning, truth, and the ethics of persuasion informed newly articulated principles for combining word and image. The young field of graphic design developed quickly during this period, and photography played a central role as a visual language of modern life. The concept Typophoto was coined by Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy and played a foundational role in the modernist graphic design movement known as the New Typography. Here, Jessica D. Brier, author of Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography, joins Ellen Lupton in conversation about this fascinating period in design history.

Jessica D. Brier is curator of photography at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. She is author of Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography, editor of On the Grid: Ways of Seeing in Print and coeditor of Making a Life in Photography: Rollie McKenna.

Ellen Lupton is a graphic designer, writer, and curator who has authored many books about design, including Thinking with Type and Extra Bold, and teaches design theory at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.

REFERENCES:

Painting, Photography, Film / László Moholy-Nagy

Jan Tschichold

Walter Benjamin

El Lissitzky

Never Use Futura / Douglas Thomas

Paul Renner

Meisterschule für Deutschlands Buchdrucker

Bauhaus

Praise for the book:

“A novel interplay between text and image, Typophoto fused—as Jessica D. Brier demonstrates in this insightful account—the interests of advertisers with those of the avant-garde, thus instigating a process that ultimately resulted in the ubiquitous pixelated imagery of our own day.

—Kathleen James-Chakraborty, author of Modernism as Memory

“Deeply researched . . . highlights the ways new print technologies enabled photography to become the central medium of modernist visual culture. “
—Paul Stirton, author of Jan Tschichold and the New Typography

Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography by Jessica D. Brier is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.