El Lissitzky’s Fragmented Vision of Urban Motion

There is a particular vitality in the work of El Lissitzky, the Russian avant garde artist who transformed photography into a vehicle for capturing not merely what exists, but what moves, what builds, what yearns forward. His composition from 1926, titled Runner in the City, emerges as a meditation on velocity and vision, a fragmented symphony of human ambition set against the electrical pulse of New York itself.

The work operates in layers, a technique characteristic of Lissitzky’s experimental approach. The artist took the figure of an urban athlete, a body in motion, and combined it with the architecture of a running track and hurdle. But he did not stop there. Into this already complex arrangement, he introduced a double exposure of Times Square, that singular intersection where commerce and culture collide with almost visible force. The result is a gelatin silver print of startling sophistication, one that refuses the conventions of straight photography in favour of something far more conceptual and daring.

By slicing the combined print into strips, Lissitzky fractured the image into fragments, each piece a window into a different aspect of his vision. This decision was not merely compositional; it was deeply philosophical. The fragmentation becomes a formal expression of modernity itself, the way urban life shatters and reconstructs itself moment by moment. The eye must reassemble what the artist has deliberately separated, making the viewer an active participant in the work’s meaning.

Symbol of Progress

The runner, caught in the dynamic geometry of track and hurdle, transforms into something larger than an athlete. He becomes a symbol of human achievement, of the body’s capacity for excellence and transcendence. Against the backdrop of New York City, rendered in double exposure and fragmented form, the figure embodies the optimism that characterised the machine age, that moment when industrial progress seemed to promise an unbounded future.

Lissitzky’s vision married Russian constructivism with American dynamism, creating a visual language that felt urgently contemporary in the 1920s and retains its power still. The photograph speaks to a particular moment when artists believed that form itself could express ideas about speed, energy and social transformation. It is a work that moves beyond mere documentation to become a meditation on modernity’s seductive momentum.

This remarkable print resides in the Metropolitan Museum’s photographs collection, a testament to how the institution recognises photography not simply as a tool for capturing reality, but as a medium capable of reimagining it entirely.

Imagery courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (@metmuseum).