Typography–Photography: Typo-Photo – Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Not curiosity, nor economic considerations alone, but a deep human interest in the events of the world, the strong desire to be involved in every situation at every moment, have brought about the enormous spread of the means of communication: typography, film, and radio.

The formative work of the artist, the experiments of the scientist, the calculations of the merchant, of the politician of today—everything that moves, everything that takes shape—is bound within the commonality of events acting upon one another. The activity of the individual that is immediate in the present moment always works simultaneously toward the long term. The technician has the machine in his hand: the satisfaction of immediate needs. But at bottom far more than that: he is the founder of the new social order, the preparer of the future. Such an effect in the long term also belongs to the work of the printer (as to that of every designer), a work still not sufficiently regarded today: international understanding and all its consequences. The work of the printer is part of the foundation on which the new world is being built.

The strict, clear work of organization is a spiritually charged consequence that brings all elements of human creation into a synthesis, into a meaningful interrelation: play instinct, participation, inventions, economic necessities in reciprocal relation. One invents printing with movable type, another photography, a third the halftone process of the block, a fourth electroplating, collotype, the light-hardened celluloid plate. Men still strike one another dead; they have still not grasped how they live, why they live. Politicians do not realize that the earth is a unity—but the tele-ear and television are being invented; tomorrow one may look into the heart of one’s fellow man, be everywhere and yet be alone. Illustrated books, newspapers, magazines are printed in their millions. The clarity of the real in everyday life is there for all classes. Slowly, the hygiene of the optical, the healthiness of the seen, permeates everything.

What is typography?
What is photography?
What is typophoto?

Typography is communication shaped in print, representation of thought. Photography is visual representation of that which can be optically apprehended.

Typophoto is communication rendered with the greatest visual exactness.

Every age has its own optical orientation. Our age is that of film, illuminated advertising, and simultaneity, of sensuously perceptible events occurring at the same time. It has also brought forth a new and constantly developing foundation of creative work for typography. Gutenberg’s typography, which reaches almost into our own day, moves in exclusively linear dimensions. Through the introduction of the photographic process, it expands into a new typography with a new dimensionality, today recognized as total. The first works in this direction had already been accomplished by illustrated newspapers, posters, and commercial printed matter.

Until recently, people clung stubbornly to a composing material and a method of typesetting which indeed guaranteed the purity of the linear, but necessarily had to leave aside the new tempo of life. Only in the very latest period has typographic work appeared which, through a contrast-rich use of typographic material (letters, signs), attempted to create a relation to contemporary life.

Yet the previous rigidity of typographic practice has scarcely been loosened by these efforts. An effective loosening can only be achieved through the broadest and most comprehensive use of photographic, zincographic, galvanoplastic, and similar techniques. The suppleness and mobility of these techniques bring economy and beauty into a new interrelation. With the development of picture telegraphy, which makes possible the immediate procurement of perfectly exact illustrations, it will probably come about that even philosophical works will employ the same means—albeit on a higher plane—as American magazines do today. Naturally, these new typographic works, in their typographic-optical-synoptic form, will be entirely different from the linearly typographic works of the present. Linear typography, which communicates thought, is only an intermediary, an emergency link between the content of communication and the receiving human being.

Communication <– Typography –> Human Being

Today an attempt is being made, instead of using typography merely as an objective means as before, to incorporate it creatively into the work through the possibilities of effect inherent in its subjective existence.

The typographic materials themselves contain strong optical perceptibilities and thereby are capable of presenting the content of communication directly in visual form—not only indirectly through the intellect. Photography, used as typographic material, is of the greatest effectiveness. It may appear as illustration alongside and in relation to words, or as »phototext« in place of words, as an unequivocal mode of representation which, in its objectivity, permits no personal or accidental interpretation. Out of optical and associative relations the design, the representation, is built up: into a visually associative, conceptually synthetic unity: into typophoto, as unambiguous representation in optically valid form. Typophoto regulates the new tempo of the new visual literature.

In the future every printing house will possess its own block-making department, and it may be stated with certainty that the future of printing belongs to photomechanical processes. The invention of the photographic typesetting machine, of new inexpensive methods for the production of blocks, and so forth, indicate the direction to which every typographer or typophotographer of today must soon adapt himself.