ism. Like the Bauhaus itself, photography at the
school was dominated by a Teutonic coolness of
form, an anti-Romantic, New World view, known
asdie Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity.
The New Objectivity, particularly as expressed
by Bauhaus photography, is a world of stark
images and abstract white cubic buildings, inhab-
ited by impersonal males and languid females. It
is a world of pure Platonic form. Bauhaus masters
claimed that their inspirations were to be found
not in art photography, but in technology and
science. Thus distortions such as scale and angle
produced abstract photographs influenced by views
the eye could actually encounter only through the
technology of a microscope or from an airplane.
Even the commonplace objects of everyday life
could become abstractions: human hands, for
example, could be seen as sculptural abstractions
in Bauhaus photographs.
The utilization of technology to create designs
free of the strictures of the past was crucial to the
Bauhaus. In fact, history courses were not part of
the curriculum. Only through removing or reducing
the capriciousness of human emotion could a mod-
ern purity of design emerge, although paradoxically,
the Bauhaus foundation courses stressed hands-on
activities through the creation of hand-made ob-
jects. The goal was an egalitarian one: to improve
the lives of ordinary people. A secondary goal was to
introduce new ways of seeing, technology under-
standably being at the forefront of this endeavor.
Purity of image, however, became so important to
Bauhaus photographers that technology was in
fact eschewed. The direct contact of the subject
with the treated paper, removing even the camera
from the process of photography, was developed by
Moholy-Nagy in the form of the photogram, a
photographic image made without the use of a cam-
era (also known as light graphics). Even though the
form had been explored earlier by practitioners
including Man Ray, the perfection and dissemina-
tion of the photogram can be seen as a seminal
contribution to photography by the Bauhaus.
Moholy-Nagy was also a sculptor, and the amal-
gam of his sculptural abstraction with the flat image
of the photograph was innovative. His imposition of
three-dimensional objects, casting their shadows di-
rectly onto the two-dimensional flat surface of the
treated photographic paper, created a wholly new
formal type of composition. Ambiguous spatial
effects are evident in these works, as unidentifiable
objects seem to float within the empty space of a
black background. One excellent example of such a
photogram is found in the collection of the Busch-
Reisinger Museum, Harvard University (BR
2004.18). Just as we think we grasp Moholy-Nagy’s
hard-edged abstraction, however, he astounds us
with his sensuous, erotic art photograph of 1927,
‘Two Torsos’ (1949, 214).
Moholy-Nagy’s first wife, Lucia, was also one of
the photographic innovators of the Bauhaus. Lucia
is renowned for the dramatic architectural portraits
of the Gropius-designed white cubic and glass Bau-
haus buildings. Her photographs provide the iconic
images of the Bauhaus complex, and the visual
memories by which the world recalls the Bauhaus.
A selection of her documentary architectural pho-
tographs, also in the collection of the Busch-Rei-
singer Museum, attests to Lucia Moholy’s formal
sense of composition, her abstract love of form, her
dramatic vision of architecture devoid of people,
her profound stillness (see, for example, BR
GA.20.57).
Other masters of the Bauhaus applied photogra-
phy with varying and interesting perspectives.
Typography master Herbert Bayer integrated pho-
tographs into his montages for posters, book jack-
ets, and advertisements. The poster Bayer designed
for master Marcel Breuer’s ‘Metallmobel’ design
exhibition is a classic. T. Lux Feininger contributed
an informal use of photography to the Bauhaus re-
pertoire, creating the most naturalistic, snapshot-
like pictures of other Bauhaus students and masters,
often unexpectedly at play. Documentary portraits
of some of the major figures in the history of mod-
ernism, who visited the Bauhaus, were made by
Bauhaus photographers, including formal pictures
of architects Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and
painters Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Ame ́de ́e
Ozenfant, and El Lissitzky, to name but a few. Pho-
tographers associated with the German Bauhaus
include Walter Peterhans, Florence Henri, and
Ellen Auerbach.
Achievement in photography at the Bauhaus was
not restricted to those primarily associated with the
medium. Josef Albers, known for his ‘‘homage to
the square’’ paintings, created photographs that
come the closest of all Bauhaus artists to what can
be called art photography, surprising in that they
indicate the painting master gave himself a freedom
in photography that he denied himself in his pri-
mary medium. In a series of abstract landscapes of
fields and fences, and views of sea foam on sand, for
example, Albers let his camera paint freely.
Thegreateducationalexperimentcametoaclosein
1933 when the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis.
Bauhaus photography continues to be valued and
appreciated not just for its rigorous aesthetics and
design innovations, but as a document of a seminal
period in the development of modernism created outBAUHAUS