Page 77 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 77/146
And there were a variety of photographic responses to Modernism and to the Man-Machine ethos signalled by the rise of factory production-line, time and motion studies - and modern warfare. In the tradition of Jacob Riis - a generation earlier - the sociologist Lewis Hine used his camera as a catalyst for social reform. His most eloquent shot of a Steam Fitter iconically captures the man- machine dichotomy that was to become a recurring leit-motif of the decades to follow, from Rus- sums’s Universal Robots, to Metropolis, Modern Times and Things to Come.
Lewis Hine: The Steam Fitter 1920.
Artists and writers in the 1920s were quick to recognize the emerging man-machine dialectic - with increasing mechanisation, now amplified by Henry Ford's production line manufacturing tech- niques (from 1913). The Czech Karel Capek produced Rossum’s Universal Robots - the first play about robots (1921) - while incidentally coining this word (and so beginning a whole sub-genre of science-fiction). But Lewis Hine pinned the issue in this iconic photograph - a man servicing an enormous machine - a prescient vision of man's role in industrialised, society - the same heroism in both capitalist and communist cultures. Charlie Chaplin was to provide an acerbically comic take on this duality in his Modern Times (1936), and in DADAesque assemblage-sculpture it is Raoul Hausmann who symbolizes it perfectly in Spirit of Our Time (1921) - the head of a tailor's dummy made into a robotic head.
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/44814