Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography

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 effecti