Stockholm (Grey Ground Abstraction)
Andreas Feininger
ANDREAS FEININGER, c.1935. GELATIN SILVER PRINT.
Feininger was not interested in people. A pioneer of modern photography, both as an artist, a writer, and an educator, almost none of his thousands of images are of humans. Instead, he captured cities, skylines, and the natural world. To look at his images is to see a flattening between these two seemingly exclusive realms. Close up, almost abstract images of shells, bones, plants and minerals seem to speak the same language as his moody, atmospheric, and often revealing images of Manhattan or, as this image is from, Stockholm. Training first as an architect, he worked at the Bauhaus where his neighbour was Moholy-Nagy, one of the founding fathers of the modern photograph. He took up the camera and never looked back, yet his architectural training is evident in everything. This abstraction of the Stockholm ground looks like a work of urban planning run wild, as much as it does some unknowable natural form. Feininger saw buildings, cities, and modernity as something not against the natural world but altogether in dialogue with it.