In 1936, László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) realised The Street Markets of London together with the journalist Mary Benedetta. The Bauhaus artist, photographer and photo theorist László Moholy-Nagy had emigrated to London in 1935 and financed himself through various commissions for artistic window display decoration, advertising and film work. The London publisher John Miles Ltd commissioned Moholy-Nagy to take photographs for three books: The Street Markets of London (1936), Eton Portrait (1937) and An Oxford University Chest (1938).

The Street Markets of London measures 21.8 x 14.5 centimetres and has 201 pages. Photographs are reproduced on 64 pages, most of them full-page. The book was published in a second modified edition by Benjamin Blom Publishers in New York in 1972; here, Moholy-Nagy’s photographs  are no longer spread throughout the book, but instead precede Benedetta’s text. The illustrations in this entry are taken from the reissue, while the description below follows the first edition, which can be consulted in the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Collection at the Pinakothek der Moderne.

László Moholy-Nagy set the book project on the street markets of London within the overarching theme of urban photography, writing: “The Photographer can scarcely find a more fascinating task than that of providing a pictorial record of modern city life. London’s street markets present him with an opportunity of this kind.” (Moholy-Nagy 1936, vii) The book opens photographically with the frontispiece showing the Petticoat Lane market. The camera’s view falls from above onto the street lined with market stalls and a throng of potential customers. On the upper left edge of the picture, a dark window arch can be seen through which the camera's view falls. The shot formulates the perspective of an observed bystander and sums up the theme of the book: the stalls, the hustle and bustle, the vendors and customers and the temporary transformation of an ordinary street into a centre of commercial activity. The first photo after the frontispiece shows, in close-up, the traders (“The Spectacle Man”, p. 1) in Petticoat Lane hunched over their counters. No one is looking at the photographer. Another photograph, again from an elevated perspective, shows two customers in “Arab” clothing with turbans (p. 3), examining clothes on the ground. This is followed by a photograph of various goods: umbrellas (p. 4), dead poultry. In Leather Lane, we encounter an engraver (p. 9) focused entirely on his work, and a trader hawking handbags (“Alf, the purse king”, p. 10). Then comes some jewellery on a counter, seen in close-up as object photography (p. 14). When buyers or sellers catch sight of László Moholy-Nagy, which rarely happens (p. 17), they sometimes pose, joking with the camera. But mostly the photographer records the unobserved moment.

Experimental perspectives are evident when a crowded stall is captured from above (p. 89), revealing, for example, a particular vendor who attracts the crowds with his performance: “A man who sells a mysterious preparation for making brass fenders look like chromium.” Moholy-Nagys’s camera also shows scenes away from the action: for example, capturing some women traders taking a rest and reading a newspaper (p. 98), or some children engrossed in play (p. 106). The Street Markets of London is a visual reminiscence of the diversity of goods, sellers and buyers. Moholy-Nagy writes: “To many people’s minds the street markets still suggests romantic notions of showmen, unorganised (sic!) trade, bargains and the sale of stolen goods. The photographic report can either encourage or correct ideas. I consider the latter to be the more important task, since in my opinion these markets are primarily to be regarded as a social necessity, the shopping-centre, in fact, for a large part of the working-class.” (Moholy-Nagy 1936, vii)  The book ends with a double portrait (p. 194) showing two men in bust portrait. The distanced observer’s perspective on the market at the beginning of the book turns into an intimate examination of the people in Billingsgate Market at the end.

All the photographs in the book express the spontaneous and the momentary; they arise from the situation and mostly present the photographer as an unobserved observer. This was only possible through a specific use of technology. Thus Moholy-Nagy writes in his preface: “For those interested in the technical aspects of photography I should add that as a rule I prefer to work with a large camera in order to obtain the minutely graded black-white-grey photo-values of the contact print, impossible to achieve in enlargements. But unfortunately the large camera is much too clumsy for taking rapid shots without being observed. The whole street immediately crowds around the photographer, the natural life of the scene is paralysed and the characteristic features of the traders, their happy-go-lucky behavior, their elementary actor’s skill, their impetuosity, are lost. Thus after several attempts with a large camera I always returned to the Leica, with which one can work rapidly, unobserved and – even in the London atmosphere, or in interiors – with a reliable degree of precision.” (Moholy-Nagy 1936, viii)

The Street Markets of London is dedicated to the city’s ‘arteries’, the streets that become temporary sales zones and attract a diverse gathering of people. The dynamics of walking across the market and through the body of the city are thus directly transferred to the wandering gaze of the reader. For Moholy-Nagy, the photobook on London’s street markets offered, among other things, the opportunity to engage photographically with his new place of residence. The photographer continued this site-specific engagement with his two subsequent books for John Miles, dedicated to an elite school and its students (Eton Portrait, text by Bernard Fergusson) and to the city and architecture of Oxford – it was also John Betjeman, author of An Oxford University Chest and editor at Architectural Review magazine, who had mediated the collaboration between John Miles Ltd and László Moholy-Nagy (Carullo 2019, 42).

The John Miles publishing house published travel books such as Around the World in 11 Years (1938) by Richard Patience and John Abbe and Freiburg and the Black Forest (1936) by Martin S. Briggs, as well as testimonials such as A Girl in Print (1937) by Mary Benedetta, about her work as a journalist. Mary Benedetta was rediscovered, incidentally, as co-author of Marriage Bureau (1942, with Mary Oliver), which describes the work of a dating agency.
In 1938, when László Moholy-Nagy's third book, An Oxford University Chest, was published by John Miles Ltd, the photographer was already in Chicago as the founder of the new bauhaus.