Paznauntal, 1930

Josef Albers’ rare photographic works have only been fully reexamined posthumously. A luminary figure of 20th century art, Albers is lauded for his role as both artist and educator at some of the most seminal institutions of modern art: from Bauhaus to Black Mountain College. Albers’ experimentation with photography predominantly occurred during his tenure at Bauhaus where he encountered pioneers of photographic modernism such as László Moholy-Nagy and his 'New Vision', a concept that considers the camera as an extension of the human eye and a tool with which to challenge the idiosyncratic nature of vision. Unlike Moholy-Nagy, Albers forewent methods of optical distortion and practiced a more restrained artistic touch, allowing himself to find the natural abstraction of the world around him, brought into focus by the geometric nature of the lens. Paznauntal, 1930 transforms the shadow cast by a rustic wooden fence into a bold, undulated black lattice that curves across the frame with striking intensity. Likewise, Birds, 1930s allows an image as commonplace as birds perched on a power-line to become an abstract configuration of raying pinpoints, stretched across a blank, gradient field of gray. These compositions employ geometric boundaries in order to highlight the relative nature of perception, an interest of Albers' made abundantly clear later in his career with the production of his Homage to the Square paintings, the nested squares of color that serve as his most iconic images.