FOTO: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945

Matthew S. Witkovsky

In the 1920s and 1930s, photography became an immense phenomenon across Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, and Poland. Through magazines and books, in advertisements and at exhibitions, from amateur clubs to avant-garde schools, photographs emerged as a key vehicle of modern consciousness.

This book presents the work of approximately one hundred individuals whose creations exemplify the potential of photography in Central Europe between the two world wars. Foto brings together for the first time works by recognized masters such as the Russian El Lissitzky, the Hungarian László Moholy-Nagy, and the German Hannah Höch—all of whom developed their photographic ideas in Germany—with contemporaries such as Karel Teige and Jaromír Funke (Czechoslovakia), Kazimierz Podsadecki (Poland), Károly Escher (Hungary), and Trude Fleischmann (Austria), who are less familiar today.

Organized thematically, the book explores topics from photomontage and war to gender identity, modern living, and the spread of surrealism.