The book "Malerei. Fotographie. Film " (Painting. Photography, Film) by painter and photographer László Moholy-Nagy was published in Germany in 1925. It was the first book to theoretically ground the principles of the "New Photography" photographic movement. Some of the criteria were: unusual perspectives and framing, diagonal lines, strong contrasts, positive/negative reversal, solarization, photomontage, close-ups, or unusual details. The repertoire of subjects was very broad, from reportage to abstract and experimental photography. The influence of these principles on the photographs of Cami and Sasha Stone is remarkable. In the examples collected here, the use of a bird's-eye view (from above) or a frog's-eye view (from below) is striking. The election poster for the Belgian Workers' Party also features a combination of a frog's-eye view in the portraits, photomontage, and an oblique construction that enhances the candidates' gaze. This same analytical framework can be applied to many of Cami and Sasha Stone's photographs. They make extensive use of the principles of New Photography in their work. With these elements in mind, it's interesting to look at their work and consider the artistic principles behind some of their images.
For example, they focus on the unique details of a building, such as the metal arch of a bridge, or on the technical elements of an installation, such as the mechanism of the Einstein Tower observatory in Potsdam. They don't hesitate to photograph buildings from daring angles. In the same spirit, they also take close-ups to create "still lifes" of everyday objects. Rather than offering an objective view, their images thus create a new perspective.
The Stones also frequently create photomontages. Sasha Stone creates a series of photomontages with the theme "If Berlin...". He combines photographs of the German capital with those of other, mostly tourist cities. This results in utopian images of a Berlin surrounded by mountains (" If Berlin were Innsbruck ") or by the sea (" If Berlin were Biarritz "). To achieve the illusion, recognizable architectural or landscape elements are inserted into the images, such as Berlin traffic and trams with the Austrian mountains of Innsbruck in the background, or the name of a Berlin subway station combined with the coast of Biarritz. The series "If Berlin..." is inspired by tourist postcards from the early twentieth century, particularly a series published in 1905 entitled " If London were Venice ." A tourist postcard normally shows the place from which it is sent. Similarly, in Sasha Stone's photographs, it had to be possible to recognize the city of Berlin and the anachronistic nature of the montage without captions.
In another photomontage, Sasha Stone combines the portrait of oil magnate John D. Rockefeller with a series of oil rigs surrounded by dense, dark smoke. He applies concepts he explained in a 1928 article published in the monthly magazine Das Kunstblatt . In it, he discusses the possibilities of photomontage, which can be used to create formal, dynamic, or semantic connections by combining different images. In the case of the montage with Rockefeller's face, it is clear that the intention is to identify the man with his professional activity. Another version of this montage was published at the time with the caption: "John D. Rockefeller, ninety years old, the world's most powerful oil magnate, the first to recognize the transformative power of oil and harness it for his own purposes" (translated from German). In the same year as Sasha Stone, the famous German anti-fascist photomontage artist John Heartfield created montages with similar motifs (a face and oil derricks) for the cover of Upton Sinclair's novel Oil! This book, published in 1926, denounced the excesses of the oil industry and capitalism. Stone, like Heartfield, used photomontage here as a critical tool. Rockefeller's face dominates the image, his stark white clothing standing out sharply against the black smoke. The accumulation of extraction wells "conquers" the entire image, in which the worker is completely absent. The photomontage combines these motifs to symbolize an expansive capitalism that exploits the invisible mass of workers.
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