Untitled

One of the chief theoreticians of the New Vision, Franz Roh advocated photography's abstraction of the real world into flat black-and-white forms as a way to revolutionize one's perspective on the world. In his own work, he advanced this agenda by making "negative prints," a technique he learned from Moholy-Nagy. This photograph is an especially adept example of the idea and one of the earliest and most articulate expressions in photography of the modernist notion of the medium itself being a primary subject of art. Roh makes witty use of the roll film's sprocket holes as a design element that plays off the image's panoply of stripes-awning, umbrella, mullion-and-pane construction of the cabana. This visual lightheartedness is punctuated by the psychological tension between the woman in the foreground and the man emerging from the doorway, resulting in a virtuoso display of photographic modernism.