Page 107 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 107/146
Janusz Maria Brzeski: Zwotnice (Crossover) Series 1936. Brzeski was a 20th century Modernist par excellence A graphic designer, draughtsman, photographer, journalist, as well as artist, curator, art-critic and experimental film-maker - he was a talented intermedia artist in the post WW1 rush to explore the new media that were emerging for the arts. These decades of the 1920s and 1930s saw a phenomenal out-pouring of creativity as artists sought to explore and exploit the new miniature cam- eras; new plastics and steel processes; the typographic and reprographic tools - and the conceptual tools of surrealism, constructivism, cubism, photo-montage and film-montage, and the new objectiv- ity (Neue Sachlichkeit). Brzeski chose to explore the impact of American capitalist-consumerism on his native Poland and on Europe generally, producing a series he called Zwotnice (cross-over) photo- montage. He was inspired by Man Ray, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, and in his previous Narodziny Robota (Birth of a Robot, 1934) series of photo-montage, explored ideas that are seminal - the man-machine- capitalist vision. - The Robot as the perfect worker...
https://mediartinnovation.com/2014/06/27/janusz-maria-brzeski-zrwonice-crossover-photomontage-series-1936/
If the definition of a pop artist is that the artist is both inspired by contemporary popular culture and uses the tools and media of that culture, Brzeski must qualify as a prototypical pop artist - creating fascinating and up till now completely under-noticed work - mostly in photo-montage - a decade or so before the earliest emergence of British pop art (Eduardo Paolozzi's collages of the mid 1940s -eg I was a Rich Man's Plaything - 1947), and Kurt Schwitters’ experiments with pop imagery around the same time..
The innovative contributions to ‘expanded photography’ covered the genres of photomontage, Da- daist and subversive subject matter - the ‘social photography’ of AIZ and arbeiter-photographen (worker’s photographs); the street-life coverage of Brassai; the personal ‘photo-diary’ of Jacques- Henri Lartigue; the social-justice documentary photographs of Dorothea Lange and others, the ex- tensive ‘city symphony’ of Berenice Abbot’s New York; the action War photography of Robert Capa, the fashion shoots of Edward Steichen and Erwin Blumenfeld (etc); the abstractionism of Bruguiere and the experimental colour images of Paul Outerbridge, and Madame Yevonde.