The Moiré Effect

by Lytle Shaw, Lex Trüb (Editor), Sina Najafi (Editor)

The life of legendary Swiss photographer Ernst Moiré is so shrouded in speculation that he sometimes seems more like a phantasm than the flesh-and-blood figure whose name will forever be linked with the well-known printer’s error. Yet as scholar Lytle Shaw reveals in The Moiré Effect , when it comes to Monsieur Moiré and his circle, fact is often stranger than fiction. Tracking the artist from his humble Alpine beginnings as the son of a postal clerk to his fateful founding of a Zurich photography studio in the 1890s and his subsequent role in the lives of a number of curious figures--including the legendary Dutch architect Mer Awsümbildungs, the theosophist philosopher Rudolf Steiner and several members of the secretive Chadwick family-- The Moiré Effect takes readers on a journey from the elegant salons of Swiss palazzi to the dusty bowels of ancient archives to a conclusion as hair-raising as it is oblique.

128 pages, Paperback

First published July 31, 2012

Reviews

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

this was a lil guy put out by the cabinet folks, it was alright. I like the jumping off point of searching for insight into Moire the man and discovering, to this day, that he is still a blight on the Austrian cultural consciousness. However the book gets pretty dry and goes a lil wayward , even though its a tiny guy, and I found myself wondering more about how this scholar could be so baller as to afford so much time and effort gallivanting around Austria hanging with only the most eccentric eccentrics for months.

[Jacob Wren]

Lytle Shaw writes:

I began to dislike Moiré. Perhaps I would revenge myself on him by cruel judgments? Who knew more than I did about him? That fact itself, to have become the world expert on a particular figure, made me embarrassed and disgusted with myself. I knew world experts on certain historical figures – they were almost without exception unremarkable human beings.