Interfaces and Proxies: Placing László Moholy-Nagy’s Prints

Although the making of relief prints hardly seems to fit with László Moholy-Nagy’s reputation as an innovator working with new media and industrialized production, Moholy-Nagy did in fact make a few dozen woodcuts and linocuts in the 1920s. In this article, the author seeks to understand Moholy-Nagy’s engagement with these techniques by focusing on the manual prints of the 1924 version of his “Dynamic of the Metropolis,” the text of which is devoted to photographic media. Examining the roles of photomechanical and manual prints in avantgarde magazines, the author argues that relief prints played a key role in the circulation of Moholy-Nagy’s work and served as a substitute for media that posed difficulties for small-scale production.