Untitled

This small photograph, about the size of a postcard enlarged a few times, is made of soft grays and blacks. It shows two circular portraits of men. On the left is El Lissitzky, holding a pipe. The other is a fellow artist, Vilmos Huszár. The two circles sit side by side, and together they read as the pupils of a ghostly eyeball. The surface is very matte, without the shine you might expect from a photograph. It is a gelatin silver photogram, made on the standard black-and-white photographic paper of the twentieth century.

Start at the left, where Lissitzky appears inside his circle with his pipe. Then move to the right-hand circle, which holds Huszár. Notice how the two round portraits sit together like a pair, and how they seem to belong to one faint, ghostly eye rather than being two separate pictures. Then look at the overall tone. The grays are soft and a little dull, and the paper has almost no sheen. That muted look is likely the result of underdevelopment, meaning the image was not left in the chemicals as long as it might have been.

El Lissitzky was a painter, architect, and designer as well as a photographer. He began experimenting seriously with photography in Germany in 1923, the year of this work. A photogram is made by placing objects directly on photographic paper and exposing them to light, with no camera or lens. Artists in Dada and Constructivist circles took up the method between 1919 and 1923. This print also lacks the usual baryta layer, a preparatory coating containing white pigment that most gelatin silver prints have. Without it, the surface turns very matte.

Lissitzky believed that avant-garde art, meaning art that pushes beyond established forms, could transform daily life. He was fascinated by photograms, multiple exposures, and what he called fotopis, loosely translated as photo-writing. Because a photogram needs no lens, it joins touch and sight. Here he makes that idea the subject. He and Huszár become the twin pupils of one eye, both pictured in the image and acting as the makers of pictures. Look a little longer at the two circles, and ask yourself whether you are seeing the eye, or being seen by it.