Jessica Portner blogs about the photographic achievements of painter Lyonel Feininger.

"Feininger was originally reluctant to take up photography, dismissing it as a “mechanical medium.” But he was lured by his neighbor, fellow Bauhaus master and photography pioneer László Moholy-Nagy… Feininger… experimented with extreme cropping, in which the entire context in a photograph is jettisoned, creating a tension between representation and abstraction and conveying immediacy and spontaneity, as seen in this photo of a locomotive in a train yard covered in snow, which seems both looming and playful."

Lyonel Feininger: Photographs, 1928–1939 is on view at the Getty Museum through March 11, 2011.