Herbert Bayer
1928
Pont Transbordeur, Marseilles

Gelatin silver print
25.0 x 17.0 cm (9 13/16 x 6 11/16 ins)
 
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987, Accession Number: 1987.1100.345, Rights and Reproduction: © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
 
Curatorial description (Accessed: 29 March 2015)
 
Head of the Bauhaus typography and advertising workshop, Herbert Bayer took up the camera about 1925, initially using photography in relation to his design work and later pursuing it for its own sake. In 1928 he traveled to Marseilles, where he photographed the Pont Transbordeur, a steel bridge with a moving "transporter" platform between its two towers that was celebrated, like the Eiffel Tower, as an icon of modern construction. As were a number of other avant-garde photographers, including his Bauhaus colleagues Moholy-Nagy and Florence Henri, Bayer was fascinated by the novel spatial relations of the bridge's crisscrossing steel girders and open spiral staircase.
 
LL/58912