Page 130 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 130/146
Jacob Riis: hand-coloured Lantern Slides from The Other Half -How it Lives and Dies in New York ( Lantern Exhibition) 1888
The breakthroughs in exhibition-design took cues from the grand world Expositions, following the Great Exhibition of 1851, and on the purely photographic level from the mixed exhibition-cum-lantern lecture cum press campaign tactics of Jacob Riis. This is one of the first instances of a coherently planned ‘projected’ photo-exhibition. It proved a highly successful, immersive, exhibition format, a few years before cinema-based experiences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Riis
The real breakthroughs in exhibition design came with the Modernist avant garde working in the 1920s and 1930s, and the first, most radical and most successful of the artists working in this field was El Lissitzky - a combined art theorist, artist-practitioner and multimedia designer, whose compo- site photographic self-portrait (The Constructor 1925) had already indicated his passion for the inte- gration of graphic-design, composite photography, and abstraction. This re-appraisal of the exhibi- tion-space was thourough - an examination of the expanded field of vision, the theatre-space, the blending of media-forms - 3d constructions, large-scale photo-prints and cut-outs - the engineering of motion into the exhibition-space via projections, moving escalators and conveyor belts, rotating po- ster frames, hanging banners...