The Discovery of Photography

The Bauhaus members experimented with the camera with enormous passion and clearly a whole lot of fun. Bathrooms were turned into darkrooms, students became models and everyday life became a subject.

One of their favourite themes was documenting the special community that existed between teachers and students at the Bauhaus. We can see this here in this photo, for example, which shows the foundation course teacher László Moholy-Nagy with students and young masters on the Elbe bathing beach.

One of the students who discovered her passion for the camera early on was Gertrud Arndt. She was trained in the weaving shop from 1923 to 1927, but never again had anything to do with textiles after graduating. Instead she turned more to photography.

Her photographic oeuvre includes 43 self-portraits as ‘mask portraits’. This here is Number 6. The pictures were taken out of ‘boredom’.

At the time, she was the wife of the architect and Bauhaus teacher Alfred Arndt and lived in one of the Master Houses. She had to do something “to kill time”. Today she is seen as one of the pioneers of self portrait photography.

This photo is by Edmund Collein, who studied at the Bauhaus from 1927 and four years later married Lotte Gerson, who has already been quoted above. It is seen as an icon of Bauhaus photography.

Collein completed the foundation course under László Moholy-Nagy and took carpentry with Marcel Breuer, painting courses with Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky and studied building with Hannes Meyer,

but all that has been preserved from his whole time at the Bauhaus are his photographs.

In 1922 Moholy-Nagy began experimenting with the photogram – ‘painting with light’ – that was to occupy him for the next two decades.

A photogram is a picture created entirely without using a camera. Objects are placed on a light-sensitive surface (such as film, photographic paper or a photographic plate) and then exposed to light.

From 1925 László Moholy-Nagy turned to photography with the camera. Here, too, he used abstract compositions which undermined conventional ways of seeing with tilted perspectives, strong light-dark contrasts and multiple exposures.

The slices of reality are often only recognisable at a second glance, as here the Eiffel Tower, which Moholy-Nagy photographed on his first trip to Paris in 1925.

As well as the photogram, Moholy-Nagy also invented another genre, photo-sculpture ...

... a combination of photo-montage, collage and painting.

According to Moholy-Nagy, this involves the creation of “unexpected tensions from the joining of photographic elements with lines and other additions, which go far beyond the meaning of the individual parts ...

... for it is precisely by intertwining photographically reproduced event elements with overlappings ranging from simple to complex that a remarkable unity is formed.

This unity can have an effect that is hilarious, moving, devastating, satirical, visionary, revolutionary, etc.“

The teacher appointed for photography was Walter Peterhans – a surprising choice, for as a trained professional photographer he was rather unknown and fully committed to depicting reality. He was no great fan of the experimental photography pursued by the likes of Moholy-Nagy, who left the Bauhaus in 1928 due to differences with Meyer.

Peterhans was a man of New Objectivity rather than New Vision.

He often worked for hours on end on his carefully staged still lifes, which were material studies in the tradition of trompe l’oeil painting with surrealistic effects ...

... to place the objects painstakingly with tweezers into the correct light to bring out the shadows and the finest differences in materials.

Typical assignments in Peterhans’ classes included material studies of glasses, fabrics and tableware.

The objects were to be depicted as neutrally as possible. The lighting played a crucial role.

What were created were technically-perfect photographs of impressive quality and depth of focus.