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Photograph - Hands Act

Hands Act

  • Object:

    Photograph

  • Date:

    1932 (made)

  • Artist/Maker:

    Bayer, Herbert, born 1900 - died 1985 (photographer)

  • Materials and Techniques:

    Gelatin-silver print and photomontage

  • Museum number:

    CIRC.650-1969

  • Gallery location:

    Prints & Drawings Study Room, level C, case TECHS

  • Image in copyright

Herbert Bayer made this photomontage when he was working as a commercial artist in Berlin, as art manager of Vogue magazine and as director of the Dorland advertising agency. In this image Bayer has arranged photographs of hands (two in plastic gloves) onto a map and re-photographed it. The joins of the different photographs are barely visible. Bayer had trained and later taught advertising and typography at the Bauhaus school. He was partly responsible for establishing photomontage as a key commercial visual style in the 1930s.

Physical description

Black and white photo-montage of gesturing hands juxtaposed with a map.

Date

1932 (made)

Artist/maker

Bayer, Herbert, born 1900 - died 1985 (photographer)

Materials and Techniques

Gelatin-silver print and photomontage

Dimensions

Height: 34 cm, Width: 24.6 cm

Historical context note

Herbert Bayer was one of the leading figures in the Bauhaus movement in Germany and throughout his career was a highly influential graphic designer and artist. Bayer began to experiment with photography while he was teaching advertising, typography and layout at the Bauhaus school in Dessau. He produced some straight photographs, highlighting the abstract structures and sculptural qualities of things, but was never interested in the technical side of photography and so his exploration of straight photography was limited. He left the Bauhaus in 1928 and established himself as a leading designer. It was at this stage that he took and interest in photomontage. He used the technique for his own artistic work but also in advertising work, where he was partly responsible for establishing photomontage as a key commercial visual style in the 1930s. His main body of photographic work was produced in the late 1920s and the 1930s, after which he continued to develop other areas of visual design.

Descriptive line

'Hands Act', by Herbert Bayer, photo-montage, 1932

Exhibition History

Mapping the Imagination (Victoria and Albert Museum 03/10/2007-24/04/2008)

Labels and date

The meaning of this image is not clear but the shapes and shadows cast by the hands echo the mountain ranges on the map. Austrian-born Herbert Bayer, a Bauhaus typographer and graphic designer, helped established photomontage as a commercial style in the 1930s. [2007]

Production Note

Attribution note: ‘Montage…is the combination of diverse photographic images to produce a new work. The combination is often achieved by re-photographing the mounted elements or by multiple darkroom exposures. In the finished work the actual physical edges become inconspicuous. The artistic result often tends towards the surreal rather than the abstract.’

Gordon Baldwin, Looking at Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum, 1991

Subjects depicted

Hands; Map

Categories

Photographs

Collection code

PDP

Qr_O93576
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