"This Is the Century of Light": László Moholy-Nagy's Painting and Photography Debate in i 10, 1927

The emergence in the 1920s of the idea that photography could be a full-fledged form of artistic expression—rather than mere mechanical imaging—led artists and art experts alike to wrestle with the question: What exactly constitutes art? Photography now challenged painting, both figurative and abstract, and as photography's many previously unsuspected potentials were revealed and explored, artists and experts felt an urgency to articulate photography's relationship to the concept of art. Invested in photography and ever the advocate of a new innovative medium and genre, László Moholy-Nagy wanted to hear what some of the most respected artists and experts of the time had to say about photography, and so in 1927 he moderated a debate on the subject of "painting and photography" in the journal Internationale Revue i 10.