Horror

The photograph entitled Horror was created at the time Hitler came to power in 1933. The man’s shoe crushing the fragile china heads of a white skinned and a dark skinned doll is one of the most often reproduced of his photographs. Franjo Mosinger (Zagreb, 1899 – 1956), after completing the Höhere Graphische Bundes- Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt, started studying architecture in Vienna. In 1918 after the death of his father Rudolf he stopped his course and returned to Zagreb to take over the renowned studio of his father at Ilica 8. The Franjo Mosinger exhibition in the Art Pavilion in 1931 was given the manifesto title of New Direction in Photography. He exhibited a number of pure photographs, with the impulses of the poetics and the characteristic repertoire of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) already present. Observation of the ephemeral subject in the representation of photography was analogous to the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp. Mosinger was the first in Croatia, not long after Man Ray, to show photograms, that is, photographs created with no negative, by the direct exposure of objects in front of the paper. The next exhibition Face of the City is a watershed and a definite break with the old ways of thinking and brings in a new approach, a new aesthetic. Mosinger laid the foundation of modern photography in Croatia, and is responsible for it having been accepted as a fully equal artistic discipline in the early 1930s.