School of Design

A lifelong Chicagoan, Nathan Lerner was among the 33 students in the 1937 inaugural class at the New Bauhaus (re-formed as the School of Design in 1939, and the Institute of Design in 1944). He returned to the school in 1945 to head its Product Design Workshop and serve as its first dean of faculty. Lerner was known for his artistic experiments with light and reflections, which led him to invent a so-called light box that allowed him to create controlled, abstract studies of objects. This image of a School of Design catalogue is an example of photographic exercises guided by László Moholy-Nagy’s article “Eight Varieties of Photographic Vision” (published in multiple versions starting in the 1920s), which listed “distorted seeing” as a photographic tool for exploring subjects. Moholy-Nagy defined this term as “optical jokes that can be automatically produced by exposure through a lens fitted with prisms.”