Photography By Hermin Abramovitch

Another Dada artist who made an impact on traditional photography was Christian Schad. He developed a photographic printing technique that was a "reinvention" of a process developed by William Henry Fox Talbot. Tristan Tzara called Schad's work "schadography," for various speculated reasons, including the term being a reference to both Schad's name and the German word "schaden," which means "damaged." "Damaged" is an appropriate adjective to describe Schad's work, as he used scraps of paper and various other little bits of trash to create his compositions. Schad would arrange his findings on a piece of sensitized paper, put a plate of glass over them to keep them in place, and expose the whole thing to light, sometimes adjusting elements in the composition during the exposure process.
Constructivism
Following in Schad's footsteps, László Moholy-Nagy created photographic prints by laying objects on sensitized paper and exposing the whole set-up to light. In line with constructivist notions of industry and the machine age, Moholy-Nagy's work was composed with pieces that had a very industrial feel or look to them. His compositions, which he called photograms, were experiments with the boundaries of photography. Moholy-Nagy's work explored the abstract capabilities of photography, extending the medium beyond its typical use of reproducing literal images of the world. He wished to show through his works that which the naked eye alone was not capable of seeing.