Typophoto

New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography

Jessica D Brier author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of Minnesota Press

Publishing:30th Apr '25

£103.00

This title is due to be published on 30th April, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

This hardback is available in another edition too:

Typophoto cover

Unveiling the avant-garde fusion of photography and modern graphic design
 

The concept Typophoto, the synthesis of photography and typography, was coined by renowned Bauhaus artist and theorist László Moholy-Nagy and played a foundational role in the modernist graphic design movement known as the New Typography. Jessica D. Brier examines how Typophoto was embraced by early graphic designers—a group who ultimately reinvented photography as a tool of modern consumerism.

 

Typophoto embodied designers’ belief in photography as an efficient form of visual communication, merging the material and the visual by abstracting both typographic and photographic form and transmuting photography into graphic material through the halftone process. Uniquely situating 1920s advertising discourse alongside avant-garde theory and significant interwar photographic concepts, Brier positions Typophoto as an analytical framework for considering how photography—as process, image, material, and metaphor—was effectively reconceived through the professionalization of graphic design in Europe and the United States. This was particularly true in Germany, where the capitalist ethos driving the country’s economic recovery bolstered the belief that graphics could create ideal reader-consumers.

 

Tracing Typophoto from its inception through New Typography’s experiments with the medium, Brier demonstrates how photography was used as a tool for manipulating perception as it became a visual language of modern life.

"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: Building Identity in the Federal Republic of Germany

 

"In this deeply researched book, Jessica D. Brier examines the close relationship between photography, typography, and mass printing in the interwar period, revealing the extent to which this both transformed the landscape of printed matter and the modes of seeing that it engendered. Above all, she highlights the ways new print technologies enabled photography to become the central medium of modernist visual culture. Alongside the key theorists László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, and Jan Tschichold, she also brings lesser-known artist–designers like Max Burchartz, Johannes Molzahn, and Georg Trump to the forefront, indicating the range and depth of work produced under the banner of Typophoto."—Paul Stirton, author of Jan Tschichold and the New Typography: Graphic Design Between the World Wars

 

ISBN: 9781517918224

Dimensions: 229mm x 178mm x 15mm

Weight: 454g

288 pages