Like László Moholy-Nagy, his colleague at the innovative German design
school the Bauhaus, and his contemporary Man Ray in Paris, Franz Roh used
photographic materials in untraditional ways. Here, he set a comb, wine glass,
and light bulb on a sheet of photographic paper and exposed it to light. When
developed, the paper revealed a nearly abstract composition that recorded the
shadows of the objects as white against a dark ground. Perhaps without knowing
it, artists making such cameraless images, or “photograms,” in the 1920s echoed
the earli­est surviving photographs, which similarly recorded the shadows of plants,
feathers, lace, and other objects.