Another work that transforms the mundane into a study in contrasting properties is Let Hands Speak Summer 1930 . But Albers found the mannequins to have a graceful, human quality that lent itself to studies in formal oppositions of hard and soft, straight and curved. The compositional strategies of montage and collage were used by many Bauhaus artists as a means of rendering the frenetic nature of the modern metropolis. For Albers, these techniques were used to convey a singular concern for temporality and emotion, as evidenced in his portraits of friends and colleagues. Composed of multiple views that exploit the camera's ability to render a subject serially, Mrs. Lewandowski, Munich, Ascona VIII 1930 consists of four images of the wife of a colleague arranged to suggest the passage of time, as though lifted from a sequence of frames of a motion picture or a contact sheet.
Scale is manipulated by altering the distance between the figure of the woman and the picture plane.
This flattening of the subject was in keeping with Albers's increasing interest in planarity, which would manifest itself not only in photographic works, but in his celebrated abstract paintings of the following decade.