Jessica D. Brier’s Typophoto is a game-changing publication on the reinvention of photography as a medium through its use in modern graphic design. It is a brilliant rereading of a key moment in modern design and photography, namely the “New Typography”, as exemplified by Jan Tschichold’s 1928 manual, at the crossroads of Bauhaus functionalism and Russian constructivism, and the “Typophoto” concept and practice in Moholy-Nagy’s Painting, Photography, Film (1925) – typophoto being defined by Brier as “a multivalent idea and practice of graphic design, connoting the hybridization of word and image through the transmutation of photography into graphic material – chiefly through the halftone process” (p. 27). In the notes for an unpublished book Fotomontage (around 1930), Tschichold will summarize it as follows: “when typography is added to photomontage, it is called typophoto” (quoted p. 120), which may be a somewhat biased way of prioritizing the notion of typography to that of photography, at least at the level of this unpublished characterization, for one of the strongest interventions of Jessica D. Brier in the debate on New Typography consists in  reestablishing the balance between typography and photography, a balance she equally highlights in Tschichold’s own practice.

All these (big) names and (symbolically charged) dates are not fortuitous. They show that the encounter of typography and photography was part of a larger movement, and that the ambition to combine verbal and visual communication was no longer limited to the field of typography where images used to be seen as mere illustrations. Something broader was going on at the very center of the cultural and technical innovations of the time in Europe as well as in the United States. Brier’s study discloses these multiple connections and transformations of typography and photography during and after the Weimar years. The book does so, first, by “thickening” the well-known Tschichold plot on visual design by studying unpublished archival material, and, second, by taking into account lesser-studied but no less important teachers and theoreticians outside the better-studied Bauhaus circle such as the “Munich Meisterschule für Deutschlands Buchdrucker”. The result is stunning. This work is much more than a new and enlarged cultural history of Moholy-Nagy and Tschichold’s role in the foundation of modern graphic design and camera-based visual culture. It proposes no less than a redefinition of typography and photography as remediated by new print technologies, first of all the half-tone technique.

The key element in Brier’s argumentation is a new take on medium-specificity. Words and images are different sign types and, therefore, other media or part of other media. However, the inseparable project of “New Typography” and “Typophoto”, each of them trying to merge texts and mechanical images in a single act of communication, shows the possibility to rethink the classic notion of medium-specificity in terms of another specificity, that of reproduction technologies. Different as they may be as formal sign systems, words and images become part of the same medium when mechanically reprinted, for the half-tone technique reproducing the continuous figurative images of a photograph and the grid-like structure of abstract typographic design tend to underline the fundamental unity of both sign types. Yet the convergence of words and images is not only technical or material, it is also functional: The mix and montage of texts and photographs aims at producing a unique message that is at the same time immediately legible and perfectly memorizable. In “New Typography” (which is as much about photography as about type and page design) and “Phototypo” (which is not just about photography and montage) words become pictures, and pictures words. Words do not only signify through their lexical content, they also communicate through their visual form (their format, the place they occupy on the page, their color, etc.). And pictures have now to be read as words and sentences: The half-tone technique changes the continuous structure of the photograph into a (highly visible) pixeled grid that needs to be deciphered as a linguistic utterance, by putting together discontinuous elements into a new signifying unity. Montage principles tend to stress the sequential arrangement and temporality of images, which become strings of pixeled units.

The shift from medium-specificity in the classic sense of the word to the specific impact of reproduction technologies is a decisive contribution to our thinking on media. It is also an important aid to a broader understanding of the life and history of forms. On the one hand, the half-tone technology can be linked to the art-historical figure of the “grid” and, more generally, to the long history of “pixeled images” (a history that starts long before the commercialization of the half-tone in the 1880s and which will not end with the contemporary digital technologies, even if they may give the illusion to be capable of superseding pixelation by its extreme high resolution). On the other hand, the insistence on half-tone technology opens new ground to connect modern typographic design with the social and industrial context that actively supports it. For both “New Typography” and “Phototypo”, the role of publicity as well as artistic experience has been well studied, but Jessica D. Brier usefully insists on other functions of the foregrounding of half-tone, whose function was also to praise and promote the creative and central position of technology itself. Far from “hiding” the technological infrastructure of their verbo-visual messages, “New Typography” and “Phototypo” emphasized the material mediation of half-tone through very visible pixelation and the no less visual retouching of camera-based material, which thus “lost” its supposedly natural and inherent figurative function in order to “win” new and other communicative functions, graphic design thus being seen as a tool to “train” the eye to new types of communication. At the same time, the accentuation of the technological making of the verbo-visual composition was an ideological stance to accentuate the performative power of technology itself in a fast-changing and increasingly mechanized society. A paradoxical procedure, given the fact the creation of certain forms of opacity was supposed to be compatible with the ambition to produce clear and legible images; but other paradoxes were at work as well, such as the tension between a left-leaning spirit of the new graphic design and its involvement in the praise and defense of industrial conglomerates or the supposedly absolute gap between functional and decorative elements.

Brier’s book offers a new and often surprising interpretive frame of “New Typography” and “Phototypo”. It goes beyond the traditional interpretation that the new graphic design is based on new combinations of words and images: what the author shows is that from the point of view of half-tone reproduction techniques, the very distinction between the verbal and the visual is blurred. The book further demonstrates the need to situate the graphic design debates in a broader context, the most important umbrella terms being the grid as well as the belief in the performative power of modern technology. In addition, Brier rightly emphasizes the necessity to link the new graphic design to strong but nevertheless rather vague ideas on  “legibility” and “memorability” to contemporary scientific attempts to quantify (and thus mechanize) both reading procedures and human memory (one of the many forms taken by the dialogue between art and science in these years). This broader view finally allows to challenge certain art-historical stereotypes, such as the antinomy between “New Typography” and “Typophoto” on the one hand and Surrealism and New Objectivity on the other hand: these movements are all part of the larger utopian spirit of the Weimar era.

I don’t think it is an exaggeration to call this book a landmark publication. Theoretically as well as methodologically, it really opens new ground. The close-reading of often less-known material is exemplary. The style is totally jargon free and a permanent pleasure to read. And Brier’s study establishes many bridges between design and other areas (photography of course, but also history, politics, communication studies or book history). One may think that “New Typography”-come-Constructivist Photography scholarship is an overcrowded field, but this study proves that there is always room for great innovative research, solidly rooted in archival research and with a strong eye for the material properties of the work under scrutiny.