A worm’s eye view: this photograph upends our expectations, helping us think more deeply about seeing.
László Moholy-Nagy, Climbing the Mast, 1928, gelatin silver print, 5.4 x 28 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Juliana Kreinik: [0:06] We’re in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and we’re looking at László Moholy-Nagy’s “Climbing the Mast,” from 1928. It’s a gelatin silver print, and it’s pretty amazing.
Dr. Vanessa Rocco: [0:15] It is amazing, and shows one of the things that he was known for with his New Vision photography, are these worm’s-eye and bird’s-eye views.
[0:24] This is a classic way to see what he meant by worm’s-eye view, this unexpected angle that you get of the climber on the mast, it’s kind of jarring and makes you stop in your tracks because it’s not the kind of positioning that you would normally expect with a straight photograph.
Dr. Kreinik: [0:44] He’s taking the worm’s-eye view very literally and upending our expectation.
Dr. Rocco: [0:49] Well, because he was always hoping that by giving us these unexpected or what was often called oblique angles, that would lead us to think deeply about what we were looking at. So you have a figure, a human figure, I actually can’t tell whether it’s male or female. Can you?
Dr. Kreinik: [1:05] Not really. Maybe it’s just not important.
Dr. Rocco: [1:07] It’s just an athletic body, climbing up to rig up a sailboat, and you get this also interesting shadow of the rope ladder, and the figure reflected on the sail that’s being rigged. You see it from directly underneath these almost disembodied-looking legs and the bottoms of the feet staring at you right in the face.
Dr. Kreinik: [1:29] It’s a totally foreshortened figure, and it takes a moment but then you finally see this head peeking through the legs, kind of looking down and making eye contact.
Dr. Rocco: [1:36] Then you have the wonderful wooden mast of the ship slicing through the center of the composition, so you can also see that he has great eye for compositional elements.
Dr. Kreinik: [1:46] I think there’s really a strong sense of geometry, as well. Everything is divided into sections. If you wanted to, you could take apart the entire thing and piece it back together.
[1:55] There’s also rhythm that he sets up visually between textures, between light and dark, between shadows, between fabric and wood, and especially the legs, which are really smooth, and the smoothness of the wood that travels all the way up. Everything is just lifting us up into this image.
Dr. Rocco: [2:12] It creates the dynamism of motion and movement swooping you into the composition. He became very convinced that photography was going to be the new language of the masses, and he actually started to refer to things like photo-literacy, that if you didn’t know how to read images, you were going to be the new illiterate.
Dr. Kreinik: [2:34] Photography was a definite weapon for them in terms of communication, in terms of revolutionary messages, in terms of art. Here, it’s Moholy playing with perspective and playing with perception and playing with our vision and really forcing us to look at things from a different point of view.
Dr. Rocco: [2:50] Absolutely. With Moholy, a lot of times the subject matter, it’s rarely overtly political. For the most part, for him, it was more about expanding the perception of the viewers that would allow them to engage with this new modern language.
[3:07] It was for the masses, so it was political, but not overtly so. Someone like Rodchenko would use these oblique, jarring angles, but he would almost always have subject matter that was also political — “Demonstrations,” “Little Pioneer Girl.”
[3:26] With Moholy, it was more of this general formulation. Still very modern-life material, especially the athleticism of the figure. A real symbol of modernity. He’ s injected that aspect of modern life.
Dr. Kreinik: [3:42] It’s contemporary figure that we’re looking at.
Dr. Rocco: [3:44] Yes, inarguably contemporary.
[3:46] [music]
