Tuesday, September 30th, 4:00-6:00pm.
On occasion of her recently published book, Dr. Brier will discuss the history and meaning of Typofoto, an avant-garde fusion of photography and modern graphic design largely developed in interwar Germany.
The concept Typophoto, the synthesis of photography and typography, was coined by renowned Bauhaus artist and theorist László Moholy-Nagy and played a foundational role in the modernist graphic design movement known as the New Typography. Jessica D. Brier examines how Typophoto was embraced by early graphic designers—a group who ultimately reinvented photography as a tool of modern consumerism.
Typophoto embodied designers’ belief in photography as an efficient form of visual communication, merging the material and the visual by abstracting both typographic and photographic form and transmuting photography into graphic material through the halftone process. Uniquely situating 1920s advertising discourse alongside avant-garde theory and significant interwar photographic concepts, Brier positions Typophoto as an analytical framework for considering how photography—as process, image, material, and metaphor—was effectively reconceived through the professionalization of graphic design in Europe and the United States. This was particularly true in Germany, where the capitalist ethos driving the country’s economic recovery bolstered the belief that graphics could create ideal reader-consumers.
Tracing Typophoto from its inception through New Typography’s experiments with the medium, Brier demonstrates how photography was used as a tool for manipulating perception as it became a visual language of modern life.
The event is free and open to the public in person at Rutgers, New Brunswick. A reception will follow
Specific location: Rutgers Academic Building (West Wing, Rm. 6051), 15 Seminary Place, New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Sponsored by
The Center for Cultural Analysis
The Developing Room
Speaker
Dr. Jessica Brier
Jessica Brier
Vassar College
Jessica D. Brier is an educator, curator, and historian of art and design with a focus on modernism and the intersecting histories of photography, print, and design. She serves as curator of photography at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, where she co-organized the exhibitions Making a Life in Photography: Rollie McKenna (2024) and organized On the Grid: Ways of Seeing in Print (2022), both accompanied by catalogs co-published by Vassar College and Scala Arts Publishers. Her first book Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography was published in 2025 by University of Minnesota Press. Her research has been supported by the American Council on Germany, Design History Society, Central European History Society, German Historical Institute, and DesignInquiry. She was previously appointed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Visual Studies Graduate Certificate from the University of Southern California and an M.A. in Curatorial Practice from the California College of the Arts.